Nasty fun from a bunch of sex kittens who’ve been there, done them.
Having told her own story in I’m With the Band (1987), Des Barres now turns the spotlight on more than a dozen of her fellow groupies.
Some are well known (scenestress-turned-actress Patti D’Arbanville, penile sculptress Cynthia Plastercaster), some are underground cult figures (self-professed Lolita and Iggy Pop pseudo-stalker Pleasant Gehman)—but none had a problem with using and being used. Everybody knew the game, they avow, so nobody was too upset that a one-night hook-up, though it might lead to an entire tour’s worth of debauchery, seldom led to anything permanent. Des Barres demonstrates solid journalistic skills in her fourth book, and her profiles of these women are for the most part objective, but she clearly has affection for her subjects. The majority are years beyond their groupie days; many of the book’s photos can be classified as then-and-now shots, tangible proof that these “band aids” have become, well, adults. For music nuts and gossipmongers, the most appealing aspect here will be the ladies’ name-dropping: Jimmy Page, Kurt Cobain, Billy Idol, Rick Springfield and Marilyn Manson are among the rockers who get called out by the likes of Bebe Buell, Tura Satana and the legendary Cherry Vanilla. The boys will probably be flattered, though maybe not a certain lead singer of whom Staci Paige says, “with all the cocaine he’s done, his penis isn’t very big.” As the quote suggests, the interviews provide the same kind of down-and-dirty details that made Des Barres’ previous work (Rock Bottom, 1996, etc.) so raunchily entertaining.
Nasty fun from a bunch of sex kittens who’ve been there, done them.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55652-668-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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