by Kristin Battista-Frazee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2014
Barely serviceable. Readers will learn a bit about the porn business of the pre-Internet age, but they might as well be...
A plodding memoir of life in 1970s smutland.
What do you do when your father decides to ditch a successful career in investment banking to go into the pornography business, cutting his teeth on the likes of Linda Lovelace? Well, if you’re a kid, you go out and play in the street, eat saltwater taffy at the beach, commune with family and only much later learn about the sordidness of the whole business, courtesy of a helpfully judgmental elder. Battista-Frazee’s father emerges from these pages as a fellow who, like so many of us, is always game to chase after the ever elusive dollar, his ethical sense always situationally located; he also comes off as a bit foolish when it came to his business, wondering why he lost his license in Philadelphia over an obscenity charge in Tennessee, puzzled about why he should have to obtain a liquor license in order to sell booze at the strip club into which he diversified. What’s clear from the outset is that he wasn't a First Amendment champion in the way of Larry Flynt or someone with a desire to shock the bourgeoisie along the lines of Al Goldstein, but instead an unimaginative fellow out to make money. His daughter’s account is similarly unimaginative: If the pornographer in question comes off as a touch hapless, the mother as the definition of long-suffering and the players a collection of Italian-American stereotypes—“I sat at the table complaining about how I didn’t want to eat. (I was an Italian mother’s worst nightmare”)—then the memoirist herself reads as merely ordinary.
Barely serviceable. Readers will learn a bit about the porn business of the pre-Internet age, but they might as well be reading about farm equipment or lumber.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-434-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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