An intriguing, if sometimes-garish, account of the lives of troubled sex workers.
Braunstein (Microgreen Garden, 2013, etc.) collects the life stories of several young, female addicts in this nonfiction work.
For more than a quarter-century, the author lived at the end of a secluded road outside the port city of New London, Connecticut. Sex workers and their clients would frequently use the road as a place to transact their business. They would deposit beer cans and condoms on the roadside, which Braunstein would clean up. “After ten years of collecting the sex workers’ trash, I began collecting their stories,” he writes in the introduction to this book, which profiles 22 such workers in the New London, Norwich, and Willimantic areas, which included two large casinos—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. These women were habitual users of hard drugs, including crack and heroin, and had turned to sex work to fund their habits. The lifestyle exposed them to dangers of all kinds, from violence to disease to incarceration, and for some, it ended in premature death. One woman, Linda, was born to a well-off family—her mother was a former beauty queen and her father raised horses—but a crack addiction led to a very different life. Another was a teenage runaway and heroin addict whose fatal overdose at age 17 led to the discovery of the motel-based brothel where she had worked. One crack addict not only robbed clients but also banks, including several during a six-day spree in three states. A law-school graduate and cocaine addict passed the bar exam but couldn’t get a jurist license due to her criminal past; after she turned to sex work, she was killed by one of her customers and left naked in the street. Braunstein’s accounts are based on interviews that he conducted with the subjects or, in the case of the deceased, people who knew them. The text mixes quotes from these first-person accounts with the author’s own reportage. Throughout, the stylized prose is full of dramatic turns of phrase. At times, though, the self-conscious presentation can feel a little too performative: “Knowing their numbed days were numbered, they held back their tears and recounted their life stories as though dictating their last testaments….Their stories are an oral history of a moral mystery.” The stories themselves, though, are often engaging and tragic, and the best make the most of the subjects’ own words. Some speak with a remarkable, epigraphic honesty: “I hated it,” says Linda of streetwalking. “It’s horrible. It’s degrading. But it was easy to do because it wasn’t like having sex. It was more like cleaning toilets.” At times, the work feels a bit exploitative, devoting much more attention to the lurid details of the subjects’ fates, for example, than on the larger systems in which they live. Even so, the act of giving voices to voiceless figures in society is an admirable one, and the book does effectively call attention to the impact of addiction in one corner of New England.
An intriguing, if sometimes-garish, account of the lives of troubled sex workers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9635663-4-8
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Panacea Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history...
A murder that transfixed the world and the invention that made possible the chase for its perpetrator combine in this fitfully thrilling real-life mystery.
Using the same formula that propelled Devil in the White City (2003), Larson pairs the story of a groundbreaking advance with a pulpy murder drama to limn the sociological particulars of its pre-WWI setting. While White City featured the Chicago World’s Fair and America’s first serial killer, this combines the fascinating case of Dr. Hawley Crippen with the much less gripping tale of Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of radio. (Larson draws out the twin narratives for a long while before showing how they intersect.) Undeniably brilliant, Marconi came to fame at a young age, during a time when scientific discoveries held mass appeal and were demonstrated before awed crowds with circus-like theatricality. Marconi’s radio sets, with their accompanying explosions of light and noise, were tailor-made for such showcases. By the early-20th century, however, the Italian was fighting with rival wireless companies to maintain his competitive edge. The event that would bring his invention back into the limelight was the first great crime story of the century. A mild-mannered doctor from Michigan who had married a tempestuously demanding actress and moved to London, Crippen became the eye of a media storm in 1910 when, after his wife’s “disappearance” (he had buried her body in the basement), he set off with a younger woman on an ocean-liner bound for America. The ship’s captain, who soon discerned the couple’s identity, updated Scotland Yard (and the world) on the ship’s progress—by wireless. The chase that ends this story makes up for some tedious early stretches regarding Marconi’s business struggles.
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history lesson.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8066-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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