Sabarra’s multitiered chronicle is salacious and provocative yet also intimate on a whole different level.
The life and times of a randy Hollywood public relations guru.
Entrepreneur and television personality Sabarra’s spicy debut memoir begins with an awkward sexual episode (the first of many to come) and ends with a genuinely heartfelt epiphany. He writes of being a sensitive Jewish child growing up in South Florida, where the heat was oppressive. School and summer camp were uncomfortable, he says, for a precocious young boy who explored gay sex at an early age. The accompanying guilt and shame made him swear off sex until he was in his early 30s, despite his high sex drive. Compounding these issues was his burgeoning obsessive-compulsive disorder and a platonic affinity for women—particularly for his junior high school teacher Sylvia Bastaja, whose life would later end suddenly. As a young man, Sabarra took solace in food, ballooned to 175 pounds and underwent several fat-reduction surgeries. His fascination with film in college manifested itself in an internship at the soap opera Guiding Light. The baby-faced author honed his schmoozing technique on set with Hollywood stars and soon rocketed up the executive chain at a major Hollywood studio. The memoir’s sex scenes flow as freely as the lavish name-dropping after he comes out to his parents and begins to date again. However, the book’s G-rated anecdotes about his bar mitzvah, his trials in Little League baseball and his “Jewish T-Rex” college roommate are also delightfully funny, painting the author as a man who struggled with youthful insecurities but emerged as a gleefully self-confident adult. Sabarra also offers insider details about his tumultuous friendship with the actress and talk show host Ricki Lake and his flings with actor Alan Cumming, figure skater Johnny Weir and a deeply troubled porn star with mild Tourette’s syndrome, which leads to the book’s most undeniably moving scenes. The narrative’s pacing can be sluggish, and the book’s title is potentially misleading. However, that shouldn’t deter readers from picking up this heartfelt, honest autobiography.
Sabarra’s multitiered chronicle is salacious and provocative yet also intimate on a whole different level.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: JBS Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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