Occasionally funny and interesting, this one-note memoir eventually wears thin.
Debut memoir about the author’s stint working at West Hollywood’s Standard Hotel, where she was paid to spend a few hours in an enclosed glass box behind the front desk.
Following her upbringing in Georgia and Connecticut, Snellings graduated from the University of Colorado with a journalism degree and decided on a whim to move to Los Angeles with friends. There, she floundered, working intermittently for a modeling agency, as a freelance writer, a waitress, an aspiring actress and, for one night per week, as a so-called “box girl.” The last job was more conceptual than laborious, and Snelling offers every imaginable detail about her weekly hours in the box, which measured 15 feet long, 4 feet wide and 5 feet tall. Required to wear white boy shorts and a white tank top, Snellings earned $100 per shift (8 p.m. to midnight) and was forbidden, while inside the box, from making eye contact with guests or employees, eating or drinking. The box was furnished with only a mattress and pillow, so Snellings read, dozed, watched people and eavesdropped. Her parents, “firmly planted in the one percent,” expressed concern over many of the author’s choices. She could easily have relied on them for financial support but admirably decided to make her own living. She includes other stories, the vast majority of which are superficial, failing to form a cohesive narrative. One chapter, “True Facts about a Box Girl,” is simply a list of random details, including the time she drank a bottle of hot sauce for $500. Snellings’ light musings on the sexualized aspect of working in the box briefly touch on Gloria Steinem’s 1963 article about going undercover as a Playboy Bunny. The author wonders “if Steinem would notice the obvious…metaphor: a woman locked below a glass ceiling.”
Occasionally funny and interesting, this one-note memoir eventually wears thin.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59376-541-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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