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 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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