A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.
An explicit collection of stories from the host of The All Out Show on Sirius.
On Angelini’s radio show, guests are likely to do anything. One—“a little punk rock, porn chick”—urinated on him as foreplay, which must have made for great radio. The author originally self-published this book, though apparently there was enough demand to attract a publisher. Nearly every one of these stories involves impersonal sex either aided or thwarted by drugs that overcome the inherent numbness of the act or reinforce it. “Drug sex is great,” he writes. “The only thing better is love sex. But if you can’t get that, drug sex is a nice consolation prize.” There is little or no “love sex” in these pages, though Angelini expresses plenty of love for his daughter, who lives with her mother, whom he misses. He dedicates the book to both of them and claims that he “figured it out too late.” And what did he figure out? It’s hard to tell, though he plainly has something of the romantic in him: “Maybe some lady will pick me up, dust me off, and see me for the man I am and not the whore I’ve been acting like.” By the end of this series of short chapters, there is no sense that he is closer to any sort of transformation, though he seems as benumbed by the depravity of a life without purpose or pleasure as readers will be. As for humor, here’s a taste: “Every time I go to Flint, I end up at LLT’s, this grimy little strip club on Saginaw. They do a five-dollar lap dance, and I know you shouldn’t go bargain hunting for your tattoos or sex workers, but I just can’t turn down a good deal….Five bucks in Flint is like ten bucks in Detroit. It’s the Tijuana of the Midwest.”
A grating collection from a poor-man’s Howard Stern.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476789309
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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