Surprisingly dry, uninspiring rendering of a potentially intriguing life story.
“Godmother” of women’s erotica reflects on her young life as a self-styled political and sexual revolutionary.
Longtime sex educator, provocateur and journalist, Bright (Love and Lust: A Sex Journal, 2010, etc.) was born to an eccentric academic couple with an abiding professional and recreational interest in India and Indian culture. Early on, the author bounced back and forth between her mother and father’s care, from Los Angeles to Edmonton. Bright’s remembrances of her parents, who were bitterly divorced when she was two, aren’t especially vivid, and what she divulges about her mother is none-too-flattering. Most striking is the recollection of her mom’s failed attempt to drive their VW into a frozen Canadian river, a suicide attempt that would have also taken Bright's life. With such an unstable upbringing, it’s not surprising that the author turned to radical politics in high school and daily confrontation with pre–Equal Rights Amendment sexism from all sides. She went off to “commie” camp as a teenager and become editorially involved with The Red Tide, a leftist publication. After waltzing through college, she decided her interests were in gender and sexual politics, and she became the founding editor of the erotica magazine On Our Backs. Yet however heroic Bright’s sexual and political accomplishments may or may not be, one gets the sense that her middle-class activist antics stem more from superficial reaction rather than personal conviction. Throughout, the author’s self-congratulatory tone may prevent readers from fully embracing Bright’s worthy sexually and politically liberating accomplishments. For someone whose career and reputation rests so heavily on being a sex expert and erotica guru, she writes about her own fairly tame sexcapades with a coldly cerebral and often ironic detachment.
Surprisingly dry, uninspiring rendering of a potentially intriguing life story.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58005-264-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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