An uneven ride through an intriguing journey of sex, lies, and videotape.
This debut memoir follows a stripper from her first days at the infamous Mitchell Brothers club to the fatal shooting of her lover.
Corday (her stage and pen name) began stripping in early 1980s San Francisco, seeking more freedom and money than her office job allowed. After winning an amateur night contest, the author quickly found an artistic home at the O’Farrell Theater, run by the enterprising Mitchell brothers. Jim and Art “Artie” Mitchell were known for the theater, which was constantly sued or shut down by the police, and for producing the 1971 porn film Behind the Green Door, starring former Ivory Snow model Marilyn Chambers. Early on, Corday began a sexual relationship with Artie, which led to a long-term connection. The author staged several of her own shows at the O’Farrell, including an act where she portrayed then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who vehemently opposed the club. Corday also befriended legendary writer and longtime Mitchell Brothers ally Hunter S. Thompson, and performed with burlesque and pornography luminaries like Tempest Storm and Traci Lords. The author acted in three Mitchell Brothers porn films, including the long-anticipated sequel to Behind the Green Door. Artie’s constant substance abuse as well as his harem sometimes compromised but never dimmed the powerful bond Corday experienced with her boss, who was shot by his own brother in 1991. The author delivers incredible tales of a strip club post-sexual revolution, offering rich details and historical tidbits. But her writing style is somewhat flawed. Though she has a master’s degree in English, her sentence structure is repetitive and her use of past and present tense inconsistent. She’s also highly critical of certain fellow dancers and performers, often commenting on their weight and her own superiority. In one behind-the-scenes story, Corday refers to a little person as a “freak.” Though memoirists don’t require likability to be compelling, the author’s judgmental attitude and habitual telling rather than showing transform what should be a titillating read into a bumpy experience.
An uneven ride through an intriguing journey of sex, lies, and videotape.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-934248-62-1
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Denizen Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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