The autobiography, much of which may be factual, of a dirty old man, illustrated with x-rated photos. You may want to wash...
The unsavory, wild adventures of the man who made his fortune delivering pornography to the American mass market, the former King of Smut, now destitute, dependent on lithium, Social Security and the kindness of strangers.
Back in the day, before the Internet made his special product available to everybody at the click of a mouse, Goldstein was a seminal figure in the industry. No dirty place was too far for his pulp magazine, Screw, to travel. Some called it liberal, countercultural, a trumpet for freedom, while others simply called it filth. Clearly, both were right. Screw embodied a special art form presenting schoolyard humor that featured naughty words, muddy photographs and explicit artwork, all as thoroughly offensive as intended. The periodical was first sold, Goldstein says, by blind newsstand operators. The publisher made millions. He wallowed in the unrelenting potty talk—he still does—and reveled in the nonstop sexual play, which he remembers fondly in his account of a unique life. Goldstein’s story is a chronicle of his appetites for expensive watches, sweet revenge, cigars, pastrami and, foremost, sex organs. It is populated by a lot of porn stars, scum-peddlers, lubricious whores, faithless wives and one disloyal son. (His own father was a “putz.”) Included are pop-culture figures like Walter Winchell, Larry Flynt and Linda Lovelace, friendly restaurateurs, slick lawyers, actor-murderers and made guys. Our hero got a rise out of the citizenry; he was jailed and, finally, forgotten and abandoned by old comrades in the sex business. Screw shut down in 2003 after 35 years and 1,800 issues. Now, Goldstein is a tired scalawag, a corpulent old lion, toothlessly gnawing old bones. Without his wealth or health, Goldstein retains his talent for lewdness.
The autobiography, much of which may be factual, of a dirty old man, illustrated with x-rated photos. You may want to wash your hands after handling this one.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-868-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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