A singularly off-putting and seamy reading experience.
A memoir about the author’s role in the secret sex lives of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars.
Bowers, a long-time Hollywood hanger-on, delivers a bizarrely upbeat, frequently stomach-churning chronicle of profligacy and perversion that frankly beggars belief. Presenting himself as some unholy amalgam of a pimp, prostitute and Jiminy Cricket, Bowers maintains an unfailingly aw-shucks tone as he details the erotic peccadilloes of dozens of iconic actors, including a coprophagous escapade with Charles Laughton that will haunt the nightmares of most readers. In Bowers’ telling, the author, a good-natured Midwesterner freshly discharged from the Marines, became the center of a prostitution underground almost immediately upon his arrival in Tinseltown, cheerfully arranging trysts by the thousands to suit any and all tastes, however outré, while being relentlessly seduced by every homosexual connected to the film industry. Bowers protests continuously that he sees nothing wrong with facilitating adultery and all manner of deviance on an epic scale, as sex is a natural drive that shouldn’t be beholden to social mores. This point becomes harder to defend as he glowingly describes his childhood sexual abuse involving a friend’s father, customers along his paper route, and various Catholic priests. Bowers’ largesse extends to these predators, who are unfailingly described as sweet, kind, gentle, lonely souls looking for a little harmless comfort. This attitude suggests an insane level of denial or merely denotes the fevered musings of a fantasist with no regard for the reputations of dozens of prominent figures in American popular culture.
A singularly off-putting and seamy reading experience.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2007-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
