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
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
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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