by Ted Schwarz ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008
A punishing read, filled with righteous anger and fuzzy on details.
Veteran true-crime/entertainment scribe Schwarz (Hollywood Confidential: How the Studios Beat the Mob at Their Own Game, 2007, etc.) charts the lurid life and times of a stripper.
The burlesque star notorious for her association with Jack Ruby and mob boss Mickey Cohen was born Juanita Slusher to impoverished parents in a small Texas town. A precociously attractive child, she was regularly abused and molested by a string of neighbors and family members. (In a particularly horrific passage, Schwarz describes eight-year-old Juanita being put up as the jackpot in a pedophile poker game.) She ran away from home in her early teens, settling in Dallas. There she immediately fell prey to “the Capture,” a tradition in which, Schwarz informs us, young girls were kidnapped, systematically raped and forced into prostitution, catering to the hypocritical Dallas establishment. After suffering in this role for a period, Juanita somehow managed to carve out a career as “Candy Barr,” a burlesque dancer whose act was so transporting that she became the toast of Las Vegas and attracted Cohen’s attention. Schwarz clearly presents this sensational material, but the book is one-dimensional. The endless litany of kidnappings, murder attempts, conspiracies, drug arrests, prison and rape after rape is hard to stomach and, after a while, hard to completely believe. Readers may raise eyebrows over the author’s unquestioning acceptance of Barr’s muddled, often half-remembered saga; they surely will wonder about his characterization of her as a brilliant artist. Quoted at length, she comes across as a rough-edged survivor and a self-mythologizer. Schwarz has written a compelling, upsetting screed against society’s depraved exploitation of an innocent, but it lacks the rigor necessary for full-scale biography and social history.
A punishing read, filled with righteous anger and fuzzy on details.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59077-126-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Taylor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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by Cheryl Strayed ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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by Glennon Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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