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
A moving yet muddled personal story.
This debut volume of a mother’s memoir recounts her experience of turning to God for solace in grieving the death of her two-year-old son.
Beginning with her adolescence and moving forward to her son’s untimely death from complications relating to influenza, Taylor writes of her lifelong curiosity about death and the role that God plays in it. After the tragedy in her family, both issues intensified to a point of obsession for the author. At its heart, this story is as compelling, difficult and rewarding as any great personal memoir. Written long after the tragedy of her son’s death, Taylor views the events and circumstances of her life and that time with the practicality necessary to prevent the narrative from slipping into an eyeless, self-indulgent mess. The problem is that Taylor places this sensible approach in a much larger scope. In the introduction, she makes clear that the entirety of the book hinges on God and how He affects our ideas of life and death. This is a fine foundation for this type of memoir, but the author is too hesitant to truly sell the idea, probably because of her difficult experiences with “death in the family” books after her son’s passing. Taylor leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between God and mortality, which comes across as alarmingly indecisive for a woman who intends to focus dutifully on that exact relationship. While it’s refreshing to see such a devout woman allow others their opinions, the author could have made her points more forcefully. However, even with this shortcoming, she tells the story of her emotional survival after her son’s death with a confiding gusto that avoids bleak self-pity, becoming palatable and mature.
A moving yet muddled personal story.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-2848-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feinberg's reflections on AIDS are often annoying and mediocre, frequently witty, and sometimes deeply disturbing. Novelist Feinberg (Eighty-Sixed, 1989) starts out unpromisingly. The first and title essay of the collection is burdened by zeitgeist clichÇs (e.g., ``I plead the Twinkie defense''), patronizing scorn for the reader's supposed ``bleeding liberal heart,'' overuse of italics for emphasis, and insights more appropriate to a T-shirt than an essay (``Reality is for people who can't cope with drugs''). After that piece, though, the writing picks up. With dark humor and rage, Feinberg brings us to ACT UP meetings and demonstrations and recounts the deaths, funerals, and memorial services of his friends. He also chronicles his own physical decay in unsparing detail; some of these sections are so visceral that they are hard to read. In lighter moments, he reflects on red ribbons, the gym, and the etiquette of HIV disclosure. Though Feinberg's humor can fall flat, most of the essays have their moments: At one point he muses, ``Gays call straights breeders...I'm sure we'll come up with a derogatory term for neggies [HIV-negative people] soon enough: Aseptic? Hermetically sealed?'' His rudeness can be delightful; on a bus, he tells some young people pondering the meaning of life to keep it down, ``because some of us are thirty and we have already had these conversations.'' Sometimes his campy, flippant style seems trivializing, but it can be highly appropriate, as when he exposes the cynical selling of AIDS, from criminally insensitive direct- mail campaigns for AIDS organizations (one group's letter begins ``Before he died, he asked me to mail this to you'') to LifeStyle Urns (cremation urns marketed specifically to people with AIDS and their survivors—some even come engraved with a lambda symbol). Despite this collection's title, Feinberg is no Hunter S. Thompson, but he does have an effective, biting edge.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85766-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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