Blogcritics Category: Books: Memoir and Autobiography

Book Review: Family Outing - What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay by Troy Johnson

Garon Cockrell — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:26:42 EDT

A deeply personal and often hilarious look into how a teenager copes with learning his mother is a lesbian.
Family Outing: What Happened When I Found Out My Mother Was Gay is the debut memoir from writer and editor Troy Johnson. It is a deeply personal and often hilarious look into how a teenager copes with learning his mother is a lesbian. Troy Johnson has delivered a touching and funny look into his life growing up, giving us a moving tale not about...

Criss Angel Mindfreak Giveaway!

Anna Creech — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:36:46 EDT

Enter to win a Prize Pack to celebrate the premiere of season 4, July 23 at 10pm ET/9C on the A&E Network.
The mysterious and mystical illusionist Criss Angel has captivated audiences around the world. With season four of the A&E real life series Criss Angel Mindfreak premiering July 23rd, Criss is conjuring up his alluring power over the eye and mind to shock fans once again. With all new illusions and tricks, Criss Angel's feats will seem...

Book Review: Chasing Lolita - How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again by Graham Vickers

Gerry Weaver — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:25:18 EDT

Lolita's legacy in pop culture, and the many ways the title character has entered the public consciousness, including entertainment, fashion, tabloid news, and sexual mores.
I’ve always had a curious relationship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I love the book and yet detest the image of Lolita as she’s been used in popular culture. The image seems to me to miss the point of the book to point of distortion. So when I came across Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted...

Book Review: A Geisha's Journey - My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice By Komomo with Photographs by Naoyuki Ogino

Jordan Richardson — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:07:18 EDT

A beautifully-photographed journey through a fascinating and mysterious world.
The world of the striking geisha has always fascinated me. Being a student of Japanese film with a lasting curiosity of Japanese culture, the geiko have always had a spellbinding effect over me. Whether featured prominently in film, as in Kinji Fukasaku’s The Geisha House or in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, or in print, the...

Book Review: Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall

Alyse Wax — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:15:00 EDT

About as unbiased look into the FLDS as one could possibly find.
This book deals with the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the extremely conservative sect of Mormonism that has recently been in the national news with the raid on a Texas FLDS camp. Mainstream Mormonism is not a factor in this book. All references and opinions in this review are strictly based on the FLDS as presented in these...

Book Review: Dobie the Canine Saint - A Spiritual Love Story by Dr. Paul Greenbaum

Violet Nesdoly — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:23:14 EDT

The story of the bond between this man and his dog will resonate with dog lovers everywhere.
When Paul Greenbaum goes to Vermont to meet his friend Tom for a camping trip in August of 1985, he has no idea that a week later he'll be driving home with Vicious, a very disturbed Doberman/Rottweiler puppy, in the back seat. In Dobie the Canine Saint - A Spiritual Love Story, Greenbaum tells about the fourteen years he and Vicious (soon renamed...

Retro Redux: Taxi Drivers Have Feelings Too

Big Geez — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:32:21 EDT

Driving a cab in the days before Travis Bickle made it scary.
When Scorsese's Taxi Driver came out in 1976, it drew a lot of attention for its graphic violence and unforgettable portrayals, including De Niro as disturbed cabbie Travis Bickle and Jodie Foster as an underage hooker. But when I first saw the film I had a couple of additional thoughts. For one thing, I was drawn to the soundtrack's lush...

Book Review: The 99th Monkey - A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments by Eliezer Sobel

Lynda Lippin — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:51:16 EDT

With Sobel as our guide we laugh, scream, cry, vomit, and refuse to drink the water used to cleanse the guru's sandals.
"I am the 99th Monkey. If you don't get me, you don't get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age simply through my continuing to be a resistant little putz." Most people of the hippie/new age/spiritual enlightenment seeking ilk...

Book Review: Unknown Waters by Alfred S McLaren

Lou Novacheck — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:44:18 EDT

The equivalent of driving across the United States with no map, blindfolded.
Unknown Waters: A First-Hand Account of the Historic Under-ice Survey of the Siberian Continental Shelf by USS Queenfish is a story of the first (in-depth?) exploration of the shallow waters off the then-USSR’s coast of Siberia. Can I call it groundbreaking, or icebreaking? Okay, I’ve made enough bad puns at the expense of this...

Book Review: Let's Spend the Night Together - Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies by Pamela Des Barres

Jade Blackmore — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 22:57:49 EDT

"No excuses offered anyway": Groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres interviews 24 backstage babes in this sexy and often poignant collection.
Pamela Des Barres, most famous for her 1987 tell-all I’m With The Band, parlayed her sexual exploits with such notorious rockers as Keith Moon, Jim Morrison and Jimmy Page into a career as the world’s most-quoted groupie. “Miss Pamela” as she was christened during her ‘60s heyday as a member of all-girl band the...