Bio Buff

Before Night Falls is Reinaldo Arena’s swansong. Wrecked by AIDs in the deadly early wave, his committed suicide in 1990, three years prior to its publication. His truth doesn’t whisper so much as lash out, unapologetically loud in his views on fucking, politics and the politics of fucking. Arena’s condemnation of Castro is total. From early expectations for improvement over Baptista, the prospects of a communist utopia retreat unrealized. He argues it is the nature of fascism to suppresses sex, humor and beauty, because dictatorships are “prudish, pompous and utterly dreary.” For his attempts to dodge these mores through life and literature, Arena is sentenced to prison until such time as he renounces his most essential impulses. The author celebrated the fluidity of sex roles in Cuba prior to his departure. At the time, Arena explains, men routinely had sex with other men without censure for homosexuality unless they were the “passive” participant. He recounts, “I preferred to h...

Geishas are not hookers. I’d say they are more akin to models, but that is also unfair. Models are known almost exclusively for their looks. Geisha train extensively in the traditional Japanese arts, such as tea ceremony, dancing, and music, and are expected to entertain flawlessly in addition to creating a pleasant visual environment. In her autobiography, Geisha, A Life , Mineko Iwasaki, with assistance from Rande Brown , presents a wonderful peak into her cloistered life as a star of Kyoto. The majority of Mineko’s youth was spent in an okiya, a geisha boarding house of sorts, run by an almighty proprietress known as the okasan. Fledgling geisha live in these establishments during their intensive, guildlike instruction period which runs seven days a week. These ladies debut as a maiko, or apprentice geisha, around the age of fifteen and serve in this capacity for approximately five years. Afterward, as a full-fledged geisha, the women are expected to have established their own ...

  Me , by Elton John, is fabulous, darling. Biographies are generally more fun when they cover someone who, albeit a nosedive or two, finds contentment. Following John’s youthful devotion to music through his drug addled disco Queen stage and onward to his present incantation as premier British philanthropist, happily married father of two, and recent inductee to the National Portrait Gallery in Londond,  Me delivers the high-end goods. Family Revelations “I never saw [my father] again. I couldn’t see the point. There was no real relationship to repair. Our lives had been completely separate for decades. There weren’t beautiful childhood reminiscences to be picked apart and savored.” Intimate revelations “I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex, largely because I’d managed to get to the age of nineteen without gaining any real knowledge or understanding of what sex actually was. Aside from my father’s questionable assertion that masturbating made you go bl...

In The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince accomplished British historian Jane Ridley sets about to improve the reputation of a man who had the misfortunate of waiting 60 years to actualize the function for which he was born. Therefore, it is no surprise the book’s subject, as the title suggests, is more famous for his personal antics than for the time he spent ruling. To his credit, this makes for more breezy reading than one focused a man thoroughly steeped in matters of government. The future king’s childhood proves that vast wealth and dynastic influence may prove no balm to discontent. By far his biggest social challenge was isolation. Personally, Bertie, the familiar by which he was known to his friends and family, undoubtably suffered from the irrefutable fact his mother often disliked him intensely.   In a letter to her daughter Vicky, Queen Victoria unleashed a litany of his shortcomings, including aesthetic – “Handsome I cannot think him, with that ...

I highly recommend Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton and Cari Lynn . Few books manage such a compelling call for social justice. More impressive, the subject of her sympathy – women stuck in the revolving door of the American industrial prison complex – are rarely featured sympathetically. However, Ms. Burton’s criminal past, like those of so many others, was deeply rooted in the circumstances of her birth – poverty, both of funds and familial guidance. Like the best books, the narrative is designed to expose the reality of a time and place one may not otherwise encounter. In this case, the setting is South Central Los Angeles as the area went from a symbol of suburban self-determination for middle-class African Americans to one denoting violence and disfunction. In this context of extreme deprivation, Ms. Burton reveals the disappointments inherent in being a child forced to grow up raw to abuse, lacking a compl...

This wasn’t the best book choice, but the damage is done. Robin , by Dave Itzkoff, isn’t a bad book, per se. The problem is inherent in the impossibility of this story offering redemption. There is nothing funny, or even really that fun, about a comedian who commits suicide. One moment in the book which sparked my delight was the description of an incident outlining the critical divide between the San Francisco and New York City approaches to life: During his first week in Manhattan, he was riding a public bus, when, a few rows ahead of him, he saw a man slump over onto the woman he was sitting next to. “Get off me!” she shouted as she changed seats. But the man was dead. The driver stopped the bus and told everyone to exit the vehicle. Robin, still the altruistic transplant from the West Coast, said he wanted to stay and help out, but the bus driver replied: “He’s dead , motherfucker, now get off! You can’t do shit for him, so take your raggedy California ass and get out of my bus!” ...