A personal and often engaging story of struggling with questions of sex and self-esteem.
A meditation on virginity, sexual pressure, and looking for love.
In this intriguingly titled memoir, DelVecchio, a professor at Durham Technical Community College in North Carolina and the author of the YA novel Dear Jane(2019), offers an engaging and sometimes troubling account of a contemporary young woman dealing with sexual expectations, stereotyping, and the male gaze. The remembrance focuses mainly on her account of how she lived in the shadow of a controlling, censorious mother and how the author saw preserving her virginity as an act of empowerment. The author, who was adopted in Greece at the age of 8, was born to a mother who was a sex worker, which later became the basis for her adoptive mother’s labeling her a “putana”(a derogatory Greek term that the author translates as whore) and trying to exert influence on every aspect of her life. Nonetheless, DelVecchio managed to have a social life while working her way through college, and she eventually stood up to her adoptive mother. Interestingly, though, the question of her moving out and living with roommates never comes up, which, considering that she paid rent to her adoptive mother, leaves unanswered questions. One ongoing thread is her long search for a romantic partner who would love her for herself and not just pursue her for sex. Throughout, she tells of limiting her sexual activity with each partner, but eventually, she would feel that she was giving too much of herself away, and each relationship failed. She periodically affirms what she feels was the rightness of not “going all the way” with each partner—including in an account of when she found that a former boyfriend got another young woman pregnant out of wedlock. As a result, the litany of failed relationships can get repetitive. However, it does lay the groundwork for a lovely surprise later in the narrative, although the author leaves the reader hanging as to what eventually happened later in her romantic life. Even with these minor flaws, though, this memoir is a thoughtful and highly readable account of dealing with sexual expectations.
A personal and often engaging story of struggling with questions of sex and self-esteem.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-337-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A political reporter’s disjointed account of her starring role in a lurid scandal.
A book about “life in America”—and love (questionable poetry included).
Nuzzi’s clumsy memoir mistakes wordiness for insight and favors coyness over clarity. The 32-year-old reporter covered the president for “many years,” during which she fell in love with a married man she calls “the Politician.” He’s widely reported to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which Nuzzi essentially confirms via many biographical details. The Politician “told me that he wanted me to have his baby” and wrote her “explicit poems,” which she shares: “I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you.” Her opacity is unintentionally funny. “I love you, [the Politician],” she writes. Frustratingly, others are cryptically identified, too. One ungainly scene features “the man for whom I worked” and “the man I did not marry.” When the Politician is absent, Nuzzi looks for meaning “in our age of insincerity.” Aiming for a this-is-the-way-we-live-now report from inside a media maelstrom, she includes Q&As with Trump employees, anecdotes about dull-witted men, government files, and observations about technology and consumerism. Hounded by tabloid reporters, she crudely likens her plight to wildfires and gun violence. Upending timeless writing advice, she doesn’t use one word when many will do. When a would-be assassin fires at Trump, he was “clipped on the ear by that which could not kill him.” American politics, Nuzzi, time itself—each is pulled “apart and apart and apart and apart.” Citing a provocative Alfred Hitchcock quote—“Blondes make the best victims”—Nuzzi floats a theory: Trump might be “the first blonde president. Is it any wonder then that he can so easily fetishize his own victimization?” This might be a joke, but like much else in this book, it doesn’t work.
A political reporter’s disjointed account of her starring role in a lurid scandal.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668209851
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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