An intelligent, provocative, and indulgent insider’s view of the contemporary porn industry.
An accidental porn journalist reflects on her role mining the sex and politics of the adult film industry.
In her post-collegiate years, G. found herself writing about porn by necessity: she desperately needed a job to stabilize her life in Manhattan. The self-described “country girl with a flair for the dramatic” was raised conservatively on a farm where educative books about sex were hidden away. A traumatic sexual assault compounded the author’s repression and tainted her view of bodily pleasure. When confronted with work on an adult magazine, G. briskly became accustomed to life as a paid porn journalist. What had formerly been her “greatest source of shame and satisfaction” had now become her livelihood. Co-founding Whack! magazine and a column as a “pervy outlier” at McSweeney’s in 2009 solidified her resolve to pursue writing as a career. Though definitely not for the sex-shy, the narrative has a breezy, conversational flow even when the author graphically discusses shock-value gonzo porn or the history of dildos. G. remains consistently affable, never flinty, despite moments of work-related exasperation such as her marked revulsion toward an overly forward Ron Jeremy at an industry expo. In addition to the more erotic personal experiences she shares while a media fixture on the adult industry circuit, G. also amassed a wealth of knowledge about how individualistically it functions, the misconceptions of those involved, and issues of racism, homophobia, and condom use. She also provides thought-provoking chapters on feminist porn and obscenity laws. As a writer with definitive feminist leanings, working in porn left G. internally conflicted as she asked herself, “could I really be a feminist and not only watch this type of sexual behavior—but profit on it?” Her answer, and the ways she reconciles this and other adverse aspects of her life, plays out through the remainder of a cleverly seductive, straightforward, unapologetically carnal chronicle of an unconventional working life.
An intelligent, provocative, and indulgent insider’s view of the contemporary porn industry.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1203-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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