Nasty fun from a bunch of sex kittens who’ve been there, done them.
Having told her own story in I’m With the Band (1987), Des Barres now turns the spotlight on more than a dozen of her fellow groupies.
Some are well known (scenestress-turned-actress Patti D’Arbanville, penile sculptress Cynthia Plastercaster), some are underground cult figures (self-professed Lolita and Iggy Pop pseudo-stalker Pleasant Gehman)—but none had a problem with using and being used. Everybody knew the game, they avow, so nobody was too upset that a one-night hook-up, though it might lead to an entire tour’s worth of debauchery, seldom led to anything permanent. Des Barres demonstrates solid journalistic skills in her fourth book, and her profiles of these women are for the most part objective, but she clearly has affection for her subjects. The majority are years beyond their groupie days; many of the book’s photos can be classified as then-and-now shots, tangible proof that these “band aids” have become, well, adults. For music nuts and gossipmongers, the most appealing aspect here will be the ladies’ name-dropping: Jimmy Page, Kurt Cobain, Billy Idol, Rick Springfield and Marilyn Manson are among the rockers who get called out by the likes of Bebe Buell, Tura Satana and the legendary Cherry Vanilla. The boys will probably be flattered, though maybe not a certain lead singer of whom Staci Paige says, “with all the cocaine he’s done, his penis isn’t very big.” As the quote suggests, the interviews provide the same kind of down-and-dirty details that made Des Barres’ previous work (Rock Bottom, 1996, etc.) so raunchily entertaining.
Nasty fun from a bunch of sex kittens who’ve been there, done them.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55652-668-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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