Puritans take note: Nothing is left to the imagination in this hypersexual memoir of life as a porn star.
The relentlessly risqué exploits of an award-winning adult film star.
Akira, an Asian-American porn actress who has starred in nearly 400 adult films, turns in a lascivious, personalized journey through the pornography industry—a provocative livelihood she has reveled in for over a decade. Akira is unapologetically prideful “for having the guts to indulge in my desires,” and the book is saturated with the intimate details of her life on the set of wet-and-wild porn shoots, her badass attitudes about others’ presumptions, navigating relationships (“omission isn’t lying”), and the frequently hilarious, surprisingly humbling anecdotes of a life spent having sex for the camera. Her X-rated hubris was definitely not passed down from the conservative, traditional Japanese parents who raised the New York native, nor was it a product of her private school education. She exposes years spent intensively experimenting with petty theft and heavy drugs, which began (and then ended) by the time she’d graduated high school. Akira then got her feet wet in the adult entertainment industry as a diffident dominatrix in a fetish fantasy club. Alive with an unconventional affinity for raw human sexuality, this exuberant memoir is effortlessly honest, without coming across as cavalier or catty. Her passion lies in the rush and the “high” of the perfectly filmed sex scene. Open-minded readers will find themselves bombarded by a carnal locomotive of industry insider secrets and amusing observations on everything from baby wipes to body odors and anal sex. Nothing, however, compares to an intoxicatingly graphic chapter of diary entries encapsulating 2012.
Puritans take note: Nothing is left to the imagination in this hypersexual memoir of life as a porn star.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2259-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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