The wink-wink title tells readers everything they need to know.
He’s more than just a porn star, people.
“I’ve had sex with more than four thousand women in my life, but I've been in love with only five of them,” says Ron Hyatt, who changed his last name to Jeremy in order to mollify his parents. You won’t know much more than that about any of them after reading this basically affable but generally repetitive autobiography of the world’s best-known porn performer; you also won’t be surprised to find out that Jeremy has had very few long-term relationships. He’s quite fascinated with his career and hopes you will be, too—you’d better be, given his obsessive-compulsive attitude toward getting work, any work, and his tendency to talk about it ad nauseum. Born in 1953, he had a good-Jewish-boy upbringing in Queens, worked various odd jobs as a young adult in the Catskills and started on a master’s degree in special education. Things changed drastically after his girlfriend talked him into sending a naked photo of himself to Playgirl. The evidence of his sizable manhood resulted in a flood of men and women calling his parents’ home, and a rising adult-film star was born. Jeremy’s narrative is occasionally informative, especially for those curious about the porn business and the world of C-list actors. He effects an amiable lack of ego, constantly mocking his bad taste in jokes, portly physique and general dork-itude, but when the ego surfaces, it’s a monster, with him endlessly relating his celebrity encounters and friendships (John Frankenheimer to Slash), paying special attention to the compliments they shower on him. This makes for an amusingly schizophrenic book: half self-positive celebration of the purportedly fun and harmless porn business, half defensive retort that the author is above all that—being a classically trained pianist and all.
The wink-wink title tells readers everything they need to know.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-084082-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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