Brash and fun, but the biographical research yields few titillating surprises—not as consistently entertaining as the...
Veteran porn editor and novelist looks at the history of American girlie mags.
Edison (I Have Fun Wherever I Go, 2008, etc.)—former High Times publisher, Hustler and Penthouse correspondent and editor in chief of Screw magazine—takes readers on an enthusiastic romp through the rise and fall of the major porno magazines of the 20th century, while profiling the self-imploding personalities who innovated effective ways of selling sexual fantasies to the average sexually dissatisfied male. Edison credibly insists that it’s these pornographers who have done all the important free-expression dirty work. His loudmouthed prose voice mixes punk attitude with a self-conscious literary style, giving a racy but otherwise conventional biographical account of high-rolling porn peddlers like Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt. It’s an interesting study of the ways influence can snowball: Using Esquire as a springboard, Hefner’s Playboy became the innovator of men’s pin-up magazines, with incrementally raunchier improvements made to this publishing model over the years by big guns like Penthouse, Hustler, and Screw. Predictably, Edison trashes Hefner as a woman hater and increasingly clueless antiquarian. Penthouse honcho Guccione and Screw founder Goldstein have the most extreme rags-to-riches-to-rags stories. Guccione made a fortune with his Vaseline-lensed nudie shots but lost it all in a predictable maelstrom of stupidity and greed. Goldstein went on to million-dollar success in New York with his hotheaded porno-political humor but was eventually felled by the Internet and (surprise!) arrogance and greed. Lawsuit-addled wheelchair warrior Flynt comes across as heroic in comparison: two bullets in the back and he’s still running a diversified, expanding porn empire. However, the brunt of the biographical facts on Flynt and Hefner seems more like common knowledge for most readers interested in Edison’s subject. More intriguing are the author’s findings on lesser players in the porn game, such as the extraordinarily hapless Ralph Ginzburg, among others.
Brash and fun, but the biographical research yields few titillating surprises—not as consistently entertaining as the electric I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59376-284-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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