Product Description
A great American love story, this warm, funny, revealing memoir introduces the world to Norman Mailer’s greatest inspiration, his wife of more than thirty years. Like Zelda Fitzgerald before her, Norris Church Mailer has led a life as large and as colorful as her husband’s—and every bit as engaging.

Growing up a strict Free Will Baptist in the South of the 1950s, Norris Church, christened Barbara Jean Davis, was crowned “Little Miss Little Rock” at the age of three and always knew that life had more to offer her than the comforts of small-town Arkansas. But she could never have guessed that in her early twenties she would date future president Bill Clinton (and predict his national victory even after he lost his first run for Congress), or that the following year she would meet Norman Mailer, who was passing through town giving a lecture at the local college. They fell in love in one night—and their marriage lasted thirty-three years.

Despite her enduring love for the man, Norris found life with the writer full of challenges—from carving out her own niche in the wake of five ex-wives and numerous former girlfriends, to easing her way into the hearts of her seven stepchildren, to negotiating the ferocious world of Mailer’s fame, friends, and literary life. The couple’s New York parties were legendary, and their social circle included such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Jacqueline Kennedy, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and Imelda Marcos.

Their decades-long obsession with each other, as seen in the intimate letters that Norris reveals here for the first time, was not without tests and infidelities; theirs was a marriage full of friendship, betrayal, doubts, understanding, and deep, complicated, lifelong passion.

With southern charm and wit, Norris Church Mailer depicts the full evolution of her life, from her childhood all the way through her intense marriage with Norman and his heartbreaking death. This unforgettable memoir will enchant readers with its honesty and insight into how we grow up and how we love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

A Candid Look at two Mailers
Long but well-paced, far more revealing of the author than her husband but still enlightening about him, this Ticket's worth buying.Norris is candid about all aspects of her life before and with Norman, including a candid appraisal of his many plotless novels and reportage.Yes, Norris focuses more on herself, but Mailer dominated her life once they met, and he dominates this memoir through Norris's slowly changing Weltanschauung -- which, it must be said, firmly placed the male Mailer always in the role of Welt.Norris slept with Bill Clinton and she, too, had an affair or two during the marriage, the first when dreams presaged the limitless liaisons Norman was engaged in.But she is devastated by the breadth of what she first takes as betrayal but later comes to forgive, but not forget.Norris's breezy writing and star-studded cast make for good reading for those not just interested in the grand world of one of the literati, but in his domestic life too.Through countless medical setbacks in later life, Norman and Norris come to appreciate what each brought to their three-decade long affair:he showed her the world; she, apparently better than any of his other countless women, helped him find an anchor to it.

A very human memoir
Why did a 26-year-old fall for a 52-year-old writer with five previous wives and a large brood of kids? We never quite figure that one out in this memoir by wife number six, though the attraction of Norman Mailer's brilliant mind was evidently the main force here. Norris Church Mailer became an artistic and literary force in her own right, but this book recounts her 30 some-odd years as Mailer's arm candy, serving as one of New York's leading ladies in the 70s and 80s when they both tore up the gossip pages. She is quite candid here, especially about her discovery years later that Mailer had girlfriends of all ages scattered everywhere he went. I couldn't help but admire the man's boundless energy, plus she insists they still had world-class sex, even though he was also getting it on simultaneously around the country. There's a lot of boring stuff here early on about her early life, though the episode as one of Bill Clinton's conquests is delightful. If you admired Norman Mailer (I've never finished any of his books except "The Naked and the Dead'), you will find this well worth reading.

Wow!This is one terrific read!
Did I ever enjoy this Kindle read!I could not put down my Kindle for the first time ever!!!Bravo bravo bravo!!!

Doris Kearns Goodwin Cover Remarks Misleading
I liked this book overall.It is well written and made interesting simply by the telling of this woman's tale - even had she not married Norman Mailer.I have two major criticisms:Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a blurb for the front and back covers and I honestly thought, if she is giving this book such a glowing review that says quite a bit and it is worth the read.Then 200 pages into it I find out that she is one of the author's best friends!!In my mind that completely discounts anything she might say about the book on a professional level.My second criticism is that the author seems to take pride in the fact that, of Mailer's 6 wives, she was the one who lasted the longest.It seems to me that the main reason she lasted and the others didn't is that she was willing to put up with his misogynistic garbage.I don't think that is necessarily something to be proud of.Those things being said, I think this was worth the read.

Not Interesting In Her Own Right
If she had not been associated with Norman Mailer, especially at the end of his life, "Norris Church" (nee Barbara Davis) would have remained a sometime model, artist and actress, and the details of her early life would have remained only of interest to herself and her immediate family.Why she spends the first third of this book on her own childhood is hard to understand except for maybe page-count purposes.The book should have summarized her early life succintly, then moved on to her introduction to Mr. Mailer.

There is no question that Ms. Church expresses herself well in words, but she doesn't talk about much that is inherently interesting.Mr. Mailer comes across as a brilliant narcissist who thrives on commotion - but is a man who has eight children by six women (or whatever, I lost count) a compelling character, even if he is sporadically witty and generous, gives lots of parties, and has many famous friends and numerous extramarital liaisons?After reading the book, I didn't feel I "knew" Norman Mailer any more deeply by virtue of having read about the chaos of his existence.I felt I had just spent way too much time with two incredibly self-centered people. ... Read more

Product Description
The final book from Norman Mailer, towering figure of American literature, in which he offers his concept of the nature of God

“I feel no attachment, whatsoever, to organized religion” wrote Norman Mailer. “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks.” And in this collection of moving, amusing, probing, and uncommon dialogues conducted over three years before his death, Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe with whom war is waged for the souls of humans. Mailer weighs the possibilities of “intelligent design,” at the same time avowing that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments–because adultery, he avers, may be a lesser evil than others suffered in a bad marriage; and he holds that technology was the Devil’s most brilliant creation. In short, Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring verbal journey, in which “God needs us as much as we need God."

Praise for On God:

“[Displays] the glory of an original mind in full provocation.”
–USA Today

“[Mailer’s] theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.”
–New York

“At once illuminating and exciting . . . a chance to see Mailer’s intellect as well as his lively conversational style of speech.”
–American Jewish Life ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

Mailer's Book on God Intriguing
Although the book written by Norman Mailer, "On God: An Uncommon Conversation" is intriguing--it was an insight on Mailer's beliefs after hinting about them in books for years--it shows that he is not a true Christian.For the Christian, this book shows how people can be misled and adhere to some pretty wild beliefs about God.

Mailer professes to believe in reincarnation, but falls short of saying he is a Buddhist.He believes in God, but short changes the attributes of God, vis-a-vis omnipotence, omniscience, and so on.

It is an easy read and I would recommend it for those who are solid in their faith, but for those wandering in the wilderness, not sure if they are a true Christian, the book has a potential to lead them astray.

Mailer's Personal Mythology
I found this book to be interesting in that it provided a very personal exposure to another's spiritual reasoning.As major criticism I offer that Mr. Mailer's vision is unconsciously Judeo-Christian, and does not rebel enough against conventional stereotypes, or should I say, images, of what might constitute God. God does not have to be outside the world that is created, and may not be the anthropomorphic figure that Mailer is fixated on. The intelligence of matter may very well be internal, in a more pantheistic sense, and what Mailer heroically portrays as God versus the Devil may well be simply our emotional human conception of the yin-yang of good vs. evil.I prefer the image of Shakti, who with one hand creates and the other destroys, without regard to the feelings of creatures affected. I cannot assume with Mr. Mailer that our personal egos are of vital concern to some all knowing deity, who is plotting out our individual destinies as part of his overall plan to build a better world.

Mailer at his Best
Mailer at his Best

A review of "On God:An Uncommon Conversation"

by Norman Mailer and Michael Lennon

240 Pages Published in 2007

ISBN-10: 1400067324
ISBN-13: 978-1400067329

Norman Mailer has been talking about theology at least since he wrote "The Executioner's Song."He says there is a struggle between God and Satan and we see this divine struggle as the clash of good and evil.We are all players in the struggle.

Reincarnation gives us many parts to play.We return as new beings in successive lives.

Mailer presents his theology well.It has a unity and a logic that you find in all his work.

I thoroughly enjoyed "On God."This book helps readers understand much of his earlier work, especially:

- The Executioner's Song

- Conversations with Norman Mailer (Literary Conversations Series)

- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

- The Gospel According to the Son

- The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

- The Castle in the Forest: A Novel

- Ancient Evenings

I thoroughly enjoyed and I recommend "On God" by Norman Mailer.

Last Advertisements for Himself
"On God" is a fascinating book as literary scholar and Mailer approved biographer asks his subject about religious topics and thoughts. Mailer presents a rather jumbled belief set which is very much a party, or faith, of one. With Mailer's thoughts going on in so many different directions with nods to gnosticism, John Milton, and eastern reincarnation concepts amongst other influences, it's hard to think that anyone but Mailer would embrace this faith. But Mailer is not trying to create a faith. He is expressing his ideas and thoughts and scholars of Mailer's works will be able to understand a number of his books better once they read "On God." While Mailer spells out his beliefs in detail in "The Castle in the Forest", having read "On God", I can now make more sense of "Ancient Evenings", "Harlot's Ghost", "The Gospel According to the Son", even the murder mystery "Tough Guys Don't Dance." This book may not lead you to a better understanding of God. But it will lead you to a better understanding of Norman Mailer, one of the best American writers of the last half of the twentieth century.

Mailer at his Best
Mailer at his Best

A review of "On God:An Uncommon Conversation"

by Norman Mailer and Michael Lennon

240 Pages Published in 2007

ISBN-10: 1400067324
ISBN-13: 978-1400067329

Norman Mailer has been talking about theology at least since he wrote "The Executioner's Song."He says there is a struggle between God and Satan and we see this divine struggle as the clash of good and evil.We are all players in the struggle.

Reincarnation gives us many parts to play.We return as new beings in successive lives.

Mailer presents his theology well.It has a unity and a logic that you find in all his work.

I thoroughly enjoyed "On God."This book helps readers understand much of his earlier work, especially:

- The Executioner's Song

- Conversations with Norman Mailer (Literary Conversations Series)

- Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

- The Gospel According to the Son

- The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing

- The Castle in the Forest: A Novel

- Ancient Evenings

I thoroughly enjoyed and I recommend "On God" by Norman Mailer.
... Read more

Product Description

"The Faith is the bible of graffiti. It forever captures the place, the time, and the writings of those of us who made it happen." —Snake I

Customer Reviews (12)

A very important book
The Norman Mailer's text is great! And probably is the first one of this kind. At the beginning of graffiti arts.
And pictures of Naar very moving

Marco

An iconic documentation and vindication of early urban graffiti in NY
The Faith of Graffiti deservedly remains an icon and reference in the documentation and vindication of graffiti, and the urban cultures it represents. Taking the form of a photo-essay with images taken by John Naar in 12 days between December 1972, and January 1973, with a text by Norman Mailer, it saw the light first in 1974 gaining cult status. A much expected reprint with a few additional images, was finally offered in 2009.

The volume operates as a sample case study documenting relatively early graffiti manifestations, although some of those involved were already talking of a dead scene at the time. While quite innovative in formalizing the work, what Naar and Mailer documented referred to a cultural form that with its shifts and transformations was already quite well developed.

These early years present a nice raw sense of graffiti in the city, and Naar's images offer an stimulating document. However Mailer's essay feels not only a bit disconnected, maybe even dated, but other than for the congratulatory hyperbole of graffiti it feels in a manner that it barely scratches the surface. The New/Gonzo Journalism employed by Mailer uses an openly personal and subjective approach that more often instead of feeling that it aims to offer the close and critical account of an experience, ends putting him egotistically at the center of the narrative.

However it is true that Mailer makes a strong case for the recognition and importance of graffiti, and in that context the essay has often been idealized to extremes. Unfortunately what he often does throughout the analysis is to put it superficially, and in my opinion unnecessarily, in parallel to the annals of high art, from renaissance masters to what was heralded at the time as contemporary masterworks displayed at the MoMA. This leaves the actual intellectual underpinning in the same muddled cultural waters of intellectual justification, social distinction. And Mailer is close to making a rather explicit defense of graffiti belonging to the same predicament. And most importantly, while he succeeded relatively in some circles with this glorification of graffiti, it leaves aside plenty if not all of the social intricacies, disputed spaces, and implications for visual communication that the emergence of graffiti in US cities represented.

On a historic sense the book is a great touching point to discredit the hyperbolic history of hip-hop graffiti. In particular how it is often assigned unquestionable paternity of a whole rebirth of an urban expression. While hip-hop graffiti in NY and the influence it exercised is essential, it requires a far more rigorous and delicate account. If anything, "The Faith of Graffiti" shows the existence of a well developed graffiti presence well before hip-hop was consolidated placing it as a fundamental cultural presence from where hip-hop and other expressions emerged. While urban graffiti in US cities had much to change into formalized expressions, here it shows in early 1973 a rather mature cultural form,which was rather self-sufficient from an also emerging hip-hop scene that would take still a few years to provide its early milestones.

Ultimately, and taking into account the 35 years passing between editions, it would have been exciting to have been offered something beyond a few extra pictures and an afterword. An adequate essay putting the work in context would have been welcome. And probably more important the geolocation of some of the images, and a critical take on how those spots-neighborhoods, and taggers, have changed over time would have been tremendously stimulating. Of course, this would have made it take an expanded analytical character not present in the original. But with so much time since the Faith of Graffiti made its mark it seems like a somewhat missed opportunity.

return of an icon
The original edition of this pioneering work has long been a scarce and much sought-after item in the second-hand book trade, a treasure for collectors and for today's graffiti artists and enthusiasts.It is therefore wonderful to see it once again made readily and widely available.

Mailer's compelling text remains unchanged, but, while those familiar with "The Faith" will recognize many old graffiti favorites, it is a joy to find that this edition includes a good number of additional images, while Naar himself notes his satisfaction that the photographs - now mostly uncropped - have been allowed to serve his original intent of showing the spirit of that time and place:mid-70s New York city.

ItBooks imprint of Harper Collins are to be congratulated on the excellent design and the very high quality of the photo-reproduction & printing.It all does justice to a seminal work celebrating the life and inventiveness of those many street "taggers", and it is fitting that the cover displays, as Naar had originally intended it should, a photograph of a group of these kids of 30+ years ago. This work is a true document of its time and place.Go buy a copy now!

An Extraordinary Time Capsule
When The Faith of Graffiti was first published, in 1974, modern graffiti-writing culture was just reaching the first of its several ascendancies. The streets and trains of New York were `destroyed' with the writers' tags. This book was the first to look at proliferate tagging not as a nuisance but as a sub-cultural movement. Jon Naar photographed his New York environment over an intensive, two-week period to produce an extraordinary time capsule. Norman Mailer later lent his voice to the project with a flawed, but well-meant, interpretation of the seemingly foreign values that had taken hold in this American city. Even though the book soon went out-of-print, it quickly rose to, and has maintained, the status of a cult classic among writers in the graffiti underground.

Now, some thirty-five years later, The Faith of Graffiti has just been re-released in its second edition. While the title remains unchanged, and its content includes virtually all of the photographs and text of the original, the book has been entirely redesigned. More photographs are included and the presentation packs a stronger wallop.The principal explanation for this is not the inclusion of additional imagery, but that Jon Naar's photographs are now presented full-frame. There is a greater sense of context associated with each image. We see the compositions as the photographer saw them. We, the book's audience, no longer need to dress up graffiti as graphic design in order to appreciate it.

After we flip past Mailer's introductory text, it is as if we, the reader, are riding a train back in the day. It is a magical train, one not bound to its rails, and our trip takes us through many of the old neighborhoods. We catch a succession of fleeting glimpses framed by our window, this book in our hands.We see spray-painted markings and may even recognize some of the names. We see fellow travelers and random pedestrians, most as absorbed in their own world as we are in ours, oblivious to the graffiti around them.We see tags on trains, trucks, on walls and on the pavement. We catch glimpses of the writers themselves, although our opportunity to converse with them is preciously short. We see the social landscape of a time gone by. Lights flash as we enter a tunnel. In momentary darkness, we contemplate the bright, neon-colored tags now seared into the backs of our eyes. Eventually we reach our destination and step back onto the wintry platform of our present concerns. Exiting the train, we carry with us the look, taste and smell of New York in the 1970's.

excellent documentation
This is fine documentation of a unique art form - gritty and powerful pictures that tell the story of a unique art form no longer observable but indicative of the spirit of the sixties. Jon Naar's pictures grab the images and Norman Mailer's introduction puts grafitti in the larger context of art and artfulness. The silent taggers who never thought of themselves as political show us politics of another kind - thanks to Naar the record of their work is here for all to see and appreciate ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Not all true, but still...
I read this book many years ago. In fact, it was the first book on Marilyn Monroe, that I ever read. I've given it 5 stars because at the time of my reading it, I enjoyed it very much. Like other reviewers, I loved the photos and the general layout of the book, but I wouldn't say this is a reliable biography of Marilyn. In fact, much of the information in this book has been proven over the years to be nonfactual, or unsubstantiated, and of course controversial. Nevertheless, it's entertaining if you treat it as a fictional novel (based on fact) rather than a true full account. Even though it was entertaining and the photos are breathtaking, I can't recommend this book to the reader who is interested in a factual narrative of her life. If you're still keen, then get it for the photography and take the rest of it with a grain of salt - unless of course if you're able to swallow the conspiracy theories that Marilyn's death involved the FBI and CIA or believe that sleazy Slatzer guy was once her lover.

THE MISFIT
I have been re-reading Norman Mailer's Marilyn- his take on the life of the legendary screen star Marilyn Monroe at a time when I have just viewed the American Masters documentary on the musical career of the singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell. And although there is no obvious connection between the lives or the talents of the two women there is a tale of two generations hidden here. Marilyn represented for my parent's generation, the generation that survived theGreat Depression and fought World War II, the epitome of blond glamour, sex and talent. To my more `sedate' generation long straight-haired blond Joni represented the introspective, searching quiet beauty that we sought to represent our longings for understanding of a seemingly baffling world that we had not made. As the this book and the Mitchell documentary points out however they `represented' our fantasies they also shared a common vulnerability attempting to be independent women in worlds dominated by men. Such is the life of the great creative talents.

Mailer traces Monroe rise from poverty, the struggle to find herself, through to the rocky and some times sleazy road to stardom. As always with Mailer one gets his take on what the symbol of Marilyn meant to my parents' generation, and, let us face it, especially men. His portrayal does not evoke his preferred hipster, beat personality but its counterpoint in the 1950's the heyday of Marilyn's fame. Mailer also goes through Marilyn various affairs with men particularly the doomed marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller. Finally he gives some very interesting details on the behind the scenes drama in the creation of many of her well-known films. Marilyn, while she was alive, never drew my eye for the reasons that Joni Mitchell did. But much later, having seen the classic The Misfits in a film revival theater, I will say just one thing about her looks and performance in that film. Wow. The marriage to Miller may have not worked out but she did right by him and herself with that performance. Yes, indeed.

This is the BEST biography ever written about our Marilyn...
I read this book in high school, and Mailer nails it!I've always wanted to read it again and now I'll get my chance thanks to Amazon.

I was enraptured with Marilyn after reading this book 20 years ago.

Cult Celebrity Status In Death, Barbituate Junkie In Life!!!
In this book the author describes the tumultuous career and life of Marylin Monroe. One gets the impression from reading this book that there are only 3 roles for actresses in Hollywood namely "Babe", "District Attorney" and "Driving Miss Daisy". Sadly Ms. Monroe did not get past the 'Babe" stage of her acting career. This book is just one of many biographies on this actress who has had more books written about her than any other deceased celebrity. One gets the feeling from reading this book that if Ms. Monoroe would have lived until her sixties then she would have just been another "has been actress" largely forgotten by the Movie Going Public and would have gotten 5 lines in her Obituary on page 10 of any newspaper like her contemporary actress Gene Tierney did. I give this book 5 stars forthe valiant attempt by the author in his efforts to illustrate the complexities of this sad,lonely lost soul.

Excellent!
I loved this book.Norman Mailer wrote this book like poetry.I could not put it down.

I am so glad you found it for me even though it was out of print.I would have hated to miss reading this book.

Also, thebook was used but was in perfect condition.Thanks foreverything.

Everyone who loves Marilyn Monroe should read this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

The Last Dance
Tim Madden awakens from a night of drunken excess, still groggy and unable to recall anything of last night.
As the hangover clears he finds his car's passenger seat sticky with blood, a new tattoo with an old flame's name and the discovery of not one but two severed heads in the nearby woods, next to his secret marijuana stash.
Was he responsible for the murder of two women, or was the crooked police chief setting him up? Madden, a failed writer, has the story of a life time to write if he can sleuth his way through it and live. A couple of ex-cons and a pissed off homosexual, his own former cell-mate, all want him dead.
In Tough Guys Don't Dance, Mailer gives us many colorful characters, in his usual descriptive style, but don't be fooled. Through all the hard-nosed Irish and Portuguese on the streets of Cape Cod this book is worth the read for the flowing narrative language alone, and besides Madden is a tough guy, so why not give him the last dance.
Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel

Way Too Many Coincidences

Great premise - but just not believable!How can so many people have so many conspiracies going on??Also too many characters that fit into plot just a little too neatly (like Bolo).And too many unexplained coicidences - like why did Patty call Madeline Laurel, which strangely enough, is Jessica's real name?Too hard to follow and too hard to wrap your brain around all the goings on.Could have been much better after a couple of rewrites!

At Dawn, if it was low tide on the Flats, I would awaken to the chatter of gulls---
c1984. Tough Guys Don't Dance, by Norman Mailer

I must read more of his works, however this Mystery is, for me, the perfect introduction to an author deserving of the title, 'Wordsmith'.I loved this novel, mainly because not one sentence in the entire book disappointed in the least.

I was also pleasantly surprised at his deftness with plot - a crazy, paranoiacal romp involving a 'wannabe' big time Eighties Drug Dealer / Playboy.The whole story revolves around the protagonist, Tim Madden, and his relationships with God, himself, other men, women, and his mother and father.It is very deep, people.At one point in his confusion and frustration, he paces to and fro, repeating, "Oh God!", "Oh man!", over and over.I will not give away the ending of the story, so you must really read it, to enjoy it as I did.

Characterization - wealthy, drug crazed, Dionysus worshipping, 'Party People' from all three Coasts:East, South, West.Also, the Protagonist and other Natives of Cape Cod, Massachussetts, in the mid Eighties time frame.The author eloquently differentiates the nuances of the various characters, with beautiful, subtle contrasts.In the film based on this book, a young Ryan O'Neal plays Madden, with Isabella Rosalini playing his true love.(Movie is great, book is best).

Setting - Cape Cod, Massachussetts, in the Winter, or off-season.Cape Cod is a tourist town, near Plymouth Rock.It is where Tim Madden works as a bartender, just like his father.It is where the ghosts of all the poor suffering souls of the ages call out for attention.

Awesome, extremely pleasurable reading.

Didn't Pass the 50 Page Test
I'm by that point in my life when Icomplete books just because I begin them.I have a "50 page test".If the book isn't holdidng my attention by then, I move on.Mailer's writing in this book struck me as someone who just enjoyed seeing his words in print, kind of like the person who talks just to hear himself talk. Just not much there. I recommend moving on to something that is actually enjoyable.

Mailer's Rushed Murder Mystery
In his take on writing "The Spooky Art", Norman Mailer admitted that "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was written in a blur to get out of a contract. The book reads like it and Mailer reuses a number of lines he used before (such as Nelson Rockefeller having a mouth within a mouth which Mailer also used in his account of the 1968 GOP national convention). Mailer offers a murder mystery that includes his thoughts on the CIA, spirits and spooks, drugs, marriage, rich kids, boxing, relationships between fathers and sons, God's role in football games, writing, John Updike's descriptions of female bodies and a host of other subjects. An absurd number of bodies pile up. This book should have been a disaster but it is breezy, often funny and there are some strange, often memorable, characters. Is it a great book? No and it certainly is not one of Mailer's better books though it is one of his funniest. In his defense, Mailer was more than aware of this and he was not trying to write a great novel. But it is a fun romp through Cape Cod and the mind of Norman Mailer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Super fast, good service
Have received the book in perfect condition and very fast as promised. Good service, will check offers again.

Of a Fire on the Moon
I have read the book (Czech translation) many years after Apollo 11 actually landed on the Moon. This is the only book by Mailer I have ever read. If you want the story and technical backgroud, go for another Apollo-related book. If you dare being provoked to think on human acts (even such as space flights) from different perspective and are not afraid to ask unusual questions, then go for it. With one objection: Mailer presents himself as Newagean (which he probably is), and it shows -- in my opinion -- too much in the book. Nevertheless, I think it is worth reading.

Self-centered view of Mailer's mind that summer
I like Norman Mailer but not this book.Having read "The Naked and the Dead" and "Harlot's Ghost," I think Mailer is great.I read part of his award-winning "Armies of the Night" in college in the Norton Anthology.Excellent.This one however brings to mind admonitions I've heard over the years about Mailer's titanic ego.It's here alright.The book is written in a modern, new-journalism sort of style; very personal--too personal.I'm not interested in Mailer's personal life when I read an account of America's moon landing!The book is wildly self-centered when he belly-aches about his losing NYC mayoral campaign before taking this assignment.And he complains about the cheap apartments he has to stay in and the heat and his desire for a drink.Very much like early Hunter Thompson in this regard, but without any laughs.Lots of Mailer's boozing mentioned in but matter-of-factly, without the meaningful counter-culture balance early Hunter was so good at when he faced political pomposity.Large sections of "Of a Fire on the Moon" are like late-night rap sessions we used to have at 24-hr diners in college.Mailer waxes not-so-poetic about sex, marriage, death, religion and the meaning of technology in the most incredible meandering, repetitious blab-a-thons.Here and there he plunges into some research or an interesting angle on the Apollo 11 mission and the astronaut personalities but the trouble is that Mailer is too removed from the principles of the story (he doesn't have personal access to anyone, exchanges one line with Von Braun at a speech.)It reminded me of when Hunter Thompson got old and lazy and published books from the point of view of a guy watching news broadcasts on cable.Mailer resorts to imaginative character-creations of the astronaut's wives who he might see from a reporter stage (or a monitor!) for several minutes.Tom Wolf does a brand of "new-journalism" too, but much more successfully in "The Right Stuff."Frankly, a lot of Mailers speculations about the meaning of mankind are just rambling and almost embarrassing.Perhaps he's the absolute wrong writer to do a "story" on the scientist-mentality and the miracle of going to the moon.I'm amazed he is so shocked by the personalities of the astronauts and engineers at Houston.Did he expect a group of creative authors like him would design and build the Saturn V?He's not doing justice to this subject exploration in the same way, let's say, Wolf did in his 60s work, whether it be Ken Kesey's hippies or stock car racers in the south.Wolf hung out with the subjects long enough to expel his Harvard aroma.And he still wore suits!Even Mailer's language here is rather sophmoric compared to the fiction I've already read of his.I hope readers will check out his other superior works.

A Unique, Entertaining, Exasperating Perspective on Apollo
I did not read "Of a Fire on the Moon" until years after the conclusion of the Apollo Moon landings between 1969 and 1972. Even so, Norman Mailer had inspired me since I first read "The Naked and the Dead" while in high school. At first, "Of a Fire on the Moon" did not attract me, however; it was so existentialist, so counterculture, so Jack Kerouac-esque. It wasn't until the 1990s when I began to explore the cultural history of Project Apollo as an icon of America memory that I returned to "Of a Fire on the Moon" and came to appreciate it's insights.

As one of the foremost contemporary American writers, Mailer was commissioned to write about the first lunar landing in the 1960s. What appeared in 1970 was this rather confusing account that is written as almost stream of consciousness ruminations on spaceflight. It provides useful insights, most importantly as Mailer with his 1960s countercultural mindset meets its antithesis, a NASA steeped in middle class values and reverence for the American flag and culture.

Mailer was forced in "Of a Fire on the Moon," grudgingly to admit that NASA's approach to task accomplishment--which he sees as the embodiment of the Protestant Work Ethic--and its technological and scientific capability got results with Apollo. He rails at NASA's closed and austere society, one where he says outsiders are distrusted and held at arm's length with a bland and faceless courtesy that betrays nothing.

For all of its skepticism, for all of its esotericism, the book captures powerful insights into rocket technology and the people who produced it in Project Apollo, but it is also heavy going to extract them from this dense book.

The best Apollo book...
If you read one book about the Apollo moon landings....this is the one.Any other account is superficial in comparison.The author gives concise technical details of the equipment and procedures of the flight.He also explores the motivation and "psychology" of the astronauts without goinggaga over their celebrity.Some funny parts are when he describes the frustration of standing in line for an hour for one soda machine (in a forest of spicy food vending machines, unused).He says 3 men at a ballpark concession stand could service the line in a few minutes.From there he has a dialog of how machines are not the answer to everything.

Another related episode is describing how the NASA engineers prefer to eat alone in their cubicles without interfacing with other humans because they are preoccupied with their technical problems...very accurate.

He compares the specialists of Mission Control to a professor having at his disposal a room of exports on English writers, poets, etc.There are other humorous examples in the book.

Toward the end of the book he weighs in with a history of how computers work, this at a time when most people's exposure to a computer was a card that said "don't fold, staple or mutilate" in their utility bill.His technical description of computers is very well done, and this is the only book on the subject that gives an accurate enough description of the computers in use at Houston and on the spacecraft that allows you to directly compare them to what we have today in a home computer.(32k of memory, for instance, on the spacecraft computers).

His technical accounts of the moon voyage are accurate and cover interesting detail I do not see by other writers; maybe if you dig into enough NASA documents you might find them.He puts a human face on the whole achievment and gives his opinion of what it all means.I think he was less impressed about it than I was, but this book is the best. ... Read more

Product Description

The winner of every major national literary award, the preeminent novelist of his generation, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a movie director, politician, pugilist, antiwar activist, hipster, philosopher, and enfant terrible, Norman Mailer has been maligned, loved, hated, belittled, idolized -- but never ignored. This sweeping biography captures the legend's extraordinary life and career in his own fascinating words and in vivid accounts by his famous peers, friends, enemies, wives, lovers, and family members. Mailer is an extraordinary tapestry, a portrait of an era as well as a man -- as protean as the subject himself and just as overflowing with life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A Jumbled Mess of a Biography
Peter Manso wrote a book on Norman Mailer back in the 80s and revisited the writer after Mailer's death in 2007. Mailer and Manso had a falling out--the subject did not like the book. Well apparently neither man let go. While "Mailer: His Life and Times" is fascinating when Manso lets Mailer's enemies and friends talk about the subject, he is awful when he talks about Mailer. The last chapter, covering 1985 until 2007 ranks as some of the worst non-fiction I have ever read. Manso dismisses Mailer's many books in those 22 years in sentences--while making claims like Mailer was out of money and that Manso was closer to some of Mailer's kids than their dad was. These may be true--they may not be. Manso offers no evidence for these claims. Even worse, Manso talks about his book on Mailer for pages--and it goes on and on. We can debate the merits of Mailer's last books. Some are interesting (I think "Harlot's Ghost" and "Castle in the Forest"), some offer a window to Mailer's thinking ("On God"), some are cut and paste "greatest hits" ("On Writing" and "Time of Our Time"), some are failures ("Picasso" and Mailer certainly had a low opinion of "Gospel According to the Son" more than a decade after it was published). All of these books meant a lot more to Mailer and help explain his life and times more than the Manso biography. Too bad Manso did not grasp that simple truth. Mailer wrote "Advertisements for Myself" decades before--but it was not a biography of another human being. This biography turns into an advertisement for the biographer instead of the subject--that may the worst literary sin and only the insightful quotes from Mailer's friends, family and foe save this book from being a complete failure.

Notes of a Displeased Groupie
Author Peter Manso published a highly readable oral history of his then-hero and mentor Norman Mailer in the '80's titled " Mailer: His Life and Times". Manso, a good writer in all other respects, has republished the book with a lengthy afterword in which he repays the insult Mailer had paid him when it turned out the biography displeased him greatly.

Mailer and Manso were close friends during the eighties, with Manso admitting as much that he was , more or less, Mailer's acolyte. The pair even shared a beach front house in Providence , Rhode Island. Mailer had written to the local paper ""P.D. Manso is looking for gold in the desert of his arid inner life, where lies and distortions are the only cactus juice to keep him going."

Ouch, that hurts. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digging punk . The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes.

I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The problem with having heroes who embody every virtue and ambition one wants to cultivate for their own is that heroes will betray you, intentionally or otherwise.

I've no idea what went on between the two men while they occupied that beach front property, but it's very possible Mailer had other things he wanted to do besides listen the sound and sight of a dedicated fan- boy sucking up; perhaps Manso crossed over from being a mere acolyte and exhibited a malignant sycophancy. Or maybe not; Manso would have served himself better getting over a three-decade old slight and finessed his remarks a tad more. It was Mailer's particular genius to make himself , as subject, fascinating in ways a reader wouldn't have suspected. That same talent isn't Manso's. Would that he merely republished his worthy oral history and gone onto another book.

Alas, Poor Manso
I read Manso's oral biography when it first came out in 1985, smitten by the matrix of competing testimony that somehow balanced out the extremes, and made Mailer seem alive, animated with ambiguity, endearing in his flaws, and audacious in his ambition. Now, in this new edition, Manso has added an afterword, detailing the breakup of their friendship and working partnership. He has lost all sight of Mailer as a subject of biography. In sixty pages of unfocused anger, he attacks the very people who were crucial to Mailer's life since Manso's account ended. He gives us a picture of the great author as a desearate to keep his name before the public with a series of what Manso calls "non-books," ignoring the accomplisments of key books written after their breakup, including Gospel According to the Son and the Castle in the Forest. He badmouths Mailer's biography of Picasso as a plagiarism of John Richardson. His screed is especially mean-spirited toward the very people Mailer drew around him in his last years: Larry Schiller, J. M. Lennon, and his wife Norris. Toward Norris, he is most poisonous, willfully distorted each positive attribute into a hideous caricature. I felt a flush of shame pass across my face, shame that Manso should fall so low as to rage against the man he so admired. In the afterword, Manso also belittles Provincetown Arts, the magazine I edit, saying that I rejected an excerpt for his 2002 book "Ptown: Art, Sex, and Money on the Outer Cape." Indeed, I did, but not, as Manso said, because I wanted to make cuts unacceptable to him, but rather because Manso came over to my house and demanded that I put his name in a banner across the logo on the magazine's cover, saying that Vanity Fair did so when his Brando book came out. The cover feature that year was Sebastian Junger, author of the Perfect Storm, and Manso said, "I'm as famous as Junger--I want equal billing!" Mailer's egotism posseses charm, Manso's arid self subsists on its own festering bile.

Good
I'm a fan of oral biographies, of which this is one. I like the immediacey of collected interview quotes, so like the way this book was presented. It's an interesting look at Mailer's life. The bit that impressed me most, was the example of the liberal elite giving a free pass to Mailer for committing a violent crime because he was one of theirs. When Mailer stabbed his wife, sending her to the hospital for a good stay, and himself to an insane asylum, the New York liberal elite pretty much excused Mailer for his behavior! The cocktail party talk about Mailer in Fifth Ave apartments was that Norman must have been a little upset, etc. He was in their clique so it was okay! It was a total duplication of the liberal elites' excusing of Bill Clinton's raping Juanita Broaddrick (read Christopher Hitchens' book NO ONE LEFT TO LIE TO for more on that). Hitchens interviewed three women who independent of each other said Bill Clinton raped them. But the liberal elite excuses Bill Clinton because he's one of theirs! I can't help but think that being a member of the liberal elite is like being the member of a cult. Anyway, it's stuff like this that makes Manso's biography of Mailer worth reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (70)

The human side of the Gospel story
Christian doctrine teaches that the Gospels are the story of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Savior of the world.But none of the Gospels was written until a generation or more after Jesus was crucified, and then largely by men who weren't present to witness the events they wrote about.How would Jesus tell his story, if he were to write his own account of his life?Here is a highly sympathetic telling of that story from Jesus' point of view.While orthodox nit-pickers will almost certainly find details here to offend them, this account is generally true to the traditional Gospel stories.At its best, this novel is a powerful reminder of the humanity of Jesus.As portrayed here, Jesus was a man who struggled to understand his role and to cope with his emotions.This story also fleshes out the context of Jesus' life, providing details about the times and places he lived in, all of which helps us understand the import of his life and message.This is a powerful story, providing the reader with insights to ponder and perhaps with a greater appreciation of the Gospel story.

A Sweeping Exploration of the Past, Valuable Lessons for Today
With impeccable scholarship and poetry of prose, Norman Mailer takes a novel approach in exploring the life of Jesus; a novel from the perspective of Jesus, in his words.

The 242 pages contain some of the strongest writing by Mailer, with not a wasted word in this highly-convincing look into story-telling, traditions and the never-ending struggle with the ego contained in the self & the games of attempted manipulation by others to gain advantages in the arena of personal power.

Not only a sweeping exploration of a history that changed the world, there are urgent lessons for today that emerge from this universal story of love, life and betrayal.

what if Jesus had a chance to set the record straight?
One man has changed the world more then any other, His weapons?Love, Faith and Hope. This Jewish carpenter has had wars started in His name, religions started and divided over exactly what He said and what His intentions were. He has saved millions and given new life to countless dead souls. His love for us was so great that He gave His life for us sinners. His words and actions are, of course, recorded in the New Testament many years of His death and resurrection. In this amazing book, Norman Mailer tries to imagine the mind of Jesus, what his thoughts were as He went through his many travails, The Wedding at Cana, the rising of Lazarus, His rant at the Temple. The stories will be familiar but the point of view is from the thoughts of Jesus rather then a disciple or someone there. It is an amazing feat which I thought captures the purity of Jesus and the conflicts. I found this book to be inspirational and beautiful.

In the eyes of the perp
Every person's take on events is different. Talk to four crime witnesses and the reality probably lies within the tetrahedron described by such threedimensional triangulation. Read four gospels and do the same. But there is always another point of view. The "perp" in TV crimeshowspeak. Norman Mailer has constructed a career and a brilliant reputation on slipping into the shoes of famous perps;the present volume continues his tour de force. Why has no one previously attempted to relate the central Christian tale from the viewpoint of its central character? Dunno. In a published interview, Mailer said his nudge came while visiting his Baptist wife's very Baptist southern hometown -- where his Jewishness made him an object of curiosity, question and friendly debate. Mailer's rendering is highly readable, plainly and artfully told, and resonates with simple truths. Whatever one might believe Jesus to be/have been, there was surely a human side to the man which was largely glossed over in the official religious tracts. Mailer gives us a master carpenter whose wisdom has been honed through fourteen years of apprenticeship, whose understanding of people and politics is pithy and profound. A miracle workerunsure of his limits (rousing Lazarus was chancy -- he had been dead awhile and was decaying), and a humble messiah at pains to point out that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were given to hyperbole (though he understands they were only doing their best to "enlarge their fold"). Altogether, a surprisingly fresh and even suspenseful treatment of a story that can hardly have a surprise ending. Whatever your chosen faith, as long as God and Mammon grapple for our hearts, there is value in a new lookat the story of one who clearly dissevered that which we owe to Caesar from that which we owe to ourselves.

The Gospel according to the Son
Norman Mailer takes us on a journey with Jesus in a new and enlightening way. It drops the mask of divinity given to us by the church leaders and endears us to Jesus in all facets of his life. I find this new slant invigorating,refreshing, and more honest. It brings to life a character that I CAN believe and admire. I heartily recommend the purchase of this book by all. I bought it for me but since reading it, I will buy it for others. Get it,read it, and pass in on. (Just don't let someone take YOUR COPY). Thanks Norman for this truly insightfull look into Jesus's life!! ... Read more

Product Description
Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with the intention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But Lovett's housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysterious figures vie for Lovett's allegiance, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power that Mailer has made all his own.   ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Socialism in One Rooming House?
As I recently noted in this space while reviewing Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers and Miami and the Siege of Chicago at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that the late author wrote. In his prime Mailer held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might have partially admitted, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. The early novel Barbary Shore under review hereonly confirms that estimation of his proper place. This is not a Mailer gem.

This novel was written shortly after Mailer's huge success with the Naked and the Dead and seemingly shared the fate of many second novels- failure to live up to expectations. Not, however, for the reasons one might think. Yes, the plot is a little contrived in building up the tensions between fellow New York rooming house lodgers, including the narrator, a wounded war veteran trying to scratch out an existence as a writer, who seem to have no existent except to act as foils for each other. Yes, the dialogue is a little forced as each character has to be just a little more arch and a little more tragic that the others. Moreover, the action is virtually nonexistent as the rooming house acts as a metaphor turning on itself here.

However none of these reasons are what causes the novel to fail. The politics, or more properly the confused philosophy, underlying the novel are too big to survive in the space allotted. The characters here, including a repentant Stalinist, a dogged governmental Red hunter and a thwarted socialist idealist are symbols for the very real struggle in Mailer's head, and in those of other Western intellectuals in the post- World War II period as well, to make sense of the contradiction between the promise of old socialist vision and the way it was being played out under Stalinist tutelage.The historic socialist struggle between Stalin and Trotsky that dominated the first half of the 20th century, American version here, as played by the denizens of a New York rooming house cannot be contained in such a milieu.

Moreover, the existentialist philosophy, with a twist of Kafka, that essentially reduces social action to the unmediated acts of individuals that would dominant much of Mailer's later writing gets its first tentative workout here as the pressure of the `Red Scare' McCarthy era and the flight from seeking socialist solutions began to have its effect on the New York intelligentsia in the early 1950's. Nevertheless it is still worthwhile to read something that is thoughtfully, if not successfully, written, as is almost always the case with Mailer. And that is really the place where Mailer finds his comradeship with Hemingway.

Mailer captured the feeling, the fear of the time
When we begin comparing different books by an author, we can run into problems.Each book, I believe, should be judged on its own.While Barbary Shore was certainly not my all time favorite book in the entire world, I could not put it down, either.Mailer's use of language, and his word choices, added to the overall feel of the novel.The feeling during the height of the McCarthy Era was one of caution and fear.I believe that he captured these things through his language choices as well as through the characters and their actions.Is this one of Mailer's best books?Probably not.I heard him speak several months ago in California.He was funny, charming, and he said that he believed Ancient Evenings was one of his favorites.At times, during Barbary Shore, it is a bit difficult to figure out what is going on, but that's what compelled me to continue with the book.I had to know.Mailer brought these characters to life, particularly with his wonderful descriptions.It is a book I would read again, and it will occupy a space on one of my many bookshelves.It was not, however, a fast paced book.It took me a bit of time to read.In fact, I had finished several other books in the time it took me to finish this one, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.There were things he wrote in this book, too, that ring true even today, particularly at the beginning of chapter 24, when he discusses the big, rich companies, the machine that makes capitalism go and grow, and the workers."The man grew smaller and the machine grew larger,..." he writes.Isn't this true today?It's worth a first, careful read.

Mailer's Only True Prose Disaster in a 50 Year Career
Mailer's second novel is that rare thing, a dull book. Overwhelmed with the success of Naked and the Dead, Mailer sought to write a Kafkaesque political thriller set against the
pulsing paranoia of the fifties, and finds himself tripped up by haphazard plotting, grating dialogue, and wooden characters.The dialogue, it needs to be said, is the stiffest assortment of cold war banter one could imagine from a political novel set in the 1950s; there is a particular failure to connect the various political disillusionments that abound through these pages with the chronically self-loathing slouching that goes on as the men and women schlep room to room in the story's shabby rooming house. Had this been an absurdist comedy, one might have gotten an appreciative chuckle if not a belly laugh by what Mailer was doing ,but this is played straight, serious as tax audit, and there is little air in the private hells each chapter outlines. The novel is remarkable if only because it wound up not being the career killer for Mailer that this sort of graceless and pretentious effort would mean for a less resilient talent. But Resilient Mailer is, as his steely production following this lethargic parable evinces.

It's interesting to note that he refers to his subsequent collection and memoir "Advertisements for Myself" as a "biography of a style", detailing his struggle to absorb and transcend his influences with a voice that was his alone , a style that would be his instrument his brilliant efforts to provoke and inspire and anger his readers.

He has particularly moving and insightful things to say about the struggle he had in the writing and rewriting of "Barbary Shore", and in retrospect we witness in the book a great writer choking on his ambition as he wrestles with a set of ideas he cannot yet put into a beautifully writ set of paragraphs. Mailer would soon develop one of the best prose styles of his time, but suffice to say that he hadn't yet come up with a set of nuances uniquely his own when this book emerged.

A good idea gone awry
McLeod is a man with a shady past. A former Communist Party official, he is now residing in a rooming house in Brooklyn just after the end of World War II. McLeod is being tailed by Hollingsworth, also a resident in the same establishment. Hollingsworth suspects McLeod of too many things and desires to interrogate and entrap him. The novel's narrator, Mike Lovett, is a disabled war veteran suffering from a severe case of amnesia. He just wants to be left alone to write his novel. He instead becomes entangled with these two gentlemen as well as with the lonely, slatternly landlady and her annoying little daughter. A down-and-out alcoholic woman also rents a room here. She also knows of some horrible secrets in McLeod's past and aims to exact some measure of revenge on him.

So goes Norman Mailer's novel of cold war intrigue. The premise of a man's radical past catching up with him and his desparate attempts to come to terms with the choices he made in his life is a good one. However, Mailer deals with these issues and his characters in an overly shallow manner. The characters come across more like types, e.g. the earnest radical socialist, rather than like real people. Mike, whose personality is largely one-dimensional, is merely a plot device, a medium through whom the other characters interact. Mike's character could easily have been eliminated. The story could have been far more interesting and even devastating were it told from the point of view of McLeod. What I believe Mailer meant to be the centerpiece of the novel, McLeod's lengthy speech on the nature of revolutionary socialism vs. state capitalism, is merely boring and flat. Too bad Mailer could not follow through on an otherwise excellent germ of an idea.

The Most Talked About Novel of 1949
Hard to believe, but when this book first appeared (it was Mailer's second novel), it was the most talked about novel of the year. What Mailer attempts here is a spooky, Kafkaesque atmosphere centered around a gloomy Brooklyn boarding house full of mysterious tenents - one of whom the young narrator fixates upon, and who turns out to be the instigator (following Stalin's orders) of the murder of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. This theme attaches the novel more to the earlier half of the century rather than the later, because its concerns - a sense of loss and bewilderment at how the radical dreams of the century's start had completely failed to find any positive fruition - were rapidly losing their hold on American intellectuals of the post-war world. Barbary Shore does impart convincingly a sense of loss - of ideals disabused - and in that sense the book is a kind of clumsy version of The God That Failed.

The problem with the book is in its execution. The Kafka atmosphere seems half-baked, even provincial - Mailer seems to have "dipped in" to Kafka rather than having actually enjoyed reading him. The whole episode of the mysterious tenent and the secret he carries - the best part of the book - seemed (to me) constantly hampered by Mailer's poor telling. As a reader I'm not surprised that Mailer more or less gave up fiction and turned to historical novels or journalism for the bulk of his career.

1949 was a bad year for some writers. The other "most talked about" book was John Horne Burns' Lucifer With a Book. Burns had written the first-rate war novel The Gallery, a lyrical piece of prose set in end-of-the-war Naples. But Lucifer With a Book was about the naughty goings-on at a boys' prep school - not something America could handle in 1949. Burns was dunned out of the States, by outraged critics who thought they had been praising a "war novelist," and soon drank himself to death in Europe. At least Mailer found a niche in journalism. Try Mailer's writings on the moon shot, were he's fascinating. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

OVERRATED SELF-INDULGENT POLEMIC...
This book, wriiten when the women's liberation movement was still in its nascent stage, is a reponse to some of the writings of the movement's leaders, in particular, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. While the author makes some valid points (I agree, political correctness does tend to have a chilling effect and censorship is to be avoided.), it is nothing more than an overrated, pretentious, self-indulgent polemic. His response to the writings of feminist intellectuals is over the top, treating their writings as mere diatribes, rather than as the cutting edge views of a segment of society that was rising up to be heard and reckoned with. Women were, indeed, the prisoner of sex, before the feminist movement loosened societal restrictions on women. Men, too, were prisoners of sex, but it was they, who were the wardens and jailers of those prisons. They were the ones who set the ground rules. The feminist movement merely ponted this out.

Moreoever, Mailer's views are often put forth in a rambling, stream of consciousness fashion, ponderous and pedantic, and often incoherent, so puffed up with self importance is the writer in his ostensible defense of the male sex. He misreads the feminist movement, thinking it to be an attack on manhood, his, in particular, when all it really was calling for was the full inclusion of women in society. Were it not for the feminist movement, women of today would still be very limited in terms of opportunities to be all that they could be, constrained by their sex. One should be mindful, however, that while women may have come a long way, they still have a way to go. There are, unfortunately, still a lot of Mailer types out there. Like the dinosaur, however, they will one day cease to exist.

OVERRATED, SELF-INDSULGENT POLEMIC...
This book, wriiten when the women's liberation movement was still in its nascent stage, is a reponse to some of the writings of the movement's leaders, in particular, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. While the author makes some valid points (I agree, political correctness does tend to have a chilling effect and censorship is to be avoided.), it is nothing more than an overrated, pretentious, self-indulgent polemic. His response to the writings of feminist intellectuals is over the top, treating their writings as mere diatribes, rather than as the cutting edge views of a segment of society that was rising up to be heard and reckoned with. Women were, indeed, the prisoner of sex, before the feminist movement loosened societal restrictions on women. Men, too, were prisoners of sex, but it was they, who were the wardens and jailers of those prisons. They were the ones who set the ground rules. The feminist movement merely ponted this out.

Moreoever, Mailer's views are often put forth in a rambling, stream of consciousness fashion, ponderous and pedantic, and often incoherent, so puffed up with self-importance is the author in his ostensible defense of the male sex. He misreads the feminist movement, thinking it to be an attack on manhood, his, in particular, when all it really was calling for was the full inclusion of women in society. Were it not for the feminist movement, women of today would still be very limited in terms of opportunities to be all that they could be, constrained by their sex. One should be mindful, however, that while women may have come a long way, they still have a way to go. There are, unfortunately, still a lot of Mailer types out there. Like the dinosaur, however, they will one day cease to exist.

Mailer shreds the cant of women's liberation
There is much to argue with in "The Prisoner of Sex", and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the womens' movement, I cheer Mailers' defense of the artists right to use their sexuality and sense of the sensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression. What makes the book important is precisely the fact that Mailer felt there was a need for a man to stand up and have a word against and about the rising tide of Feminist theory; while many male writers were too confused, adrift in daydreams of irony or bottled up rage, and while the academy was surrendering its arms without a shot being fired, Mailer spoke up and wrote that there was a profound and important difference between the sexes, and that while social justice must and will prevail regarding the rights of women in the work place and overall social sphere, one cannot maintain, straight faced, that the only difference between the sexes has to do with genitalia.

There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating arguement,where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatics hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millets' orginal critique in "Sexual Politics" is literary criticism at its most emphatic. "Prisoner of Sex" is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself.

OVERRATEDSELF-INDULGENT POLEMIC...
This book, wriiten when the women's liberation movement was still inits nascent stage, is a reponse to some of the writings of the movement's leaders, in particular, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem. While the author makes some valid points (I agree, political correctness does tend to have a chilling effect and censorship is to be avoided.), it is nothing more than an overrated, pretentious, self-indulgent polemic. His response to the writings of feminist intellectuals is over the top, treating their writings as mere diatribes, rather than as the cutting edge views of a segment of society that was rising up to be heard and reckoned with.Women were, indeed, the prisoner of sex, before the feminist movement loosened societal restrictions on women. Men, too, were prisoners of sex, but it was they, who were the wardens and jailers of those prisons. They were the ones who set the ground rules. The feminist movement merely ponted this out.

Moreoever, Mailer's views are often put forth in a rambling, stream of consciousness fashion, ponderous and pedantic, and often incoherent, so puffed up with self importance is the writer in his ostensible defense of the male sex. He misreads the feminist movement, thinking it to be an attack on manhood, his, in particular, when all it really was calling for was the full inclusion of women in society. Were it not for the feminist movement, women of today would still be very limited in terms of opportunities to be all that they could be, constrained by their sex. One should be mindful, however, that while women may have come a long way, they still have a way to go. There are, unfortunately, still a lot of Mailer types out there. Likethe dinosaur, however, they will one day cease to exist.

Mailer as Literary Critic Intrigues
There is much to argue with in "The Prisoner of Sex", and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the womens' movement, I cheer Mailers' defense of the artists right to use their sexuality and sense of thesensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression.

There are timeswhen Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating arguement,wherehis romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatics hallucinations, buthis defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments ofMillets' orginal critique in "Sexual Politics" is literarycriticism at its most emphatic.

"Prisoner of Sex" is, I'mafraid, incoherant at times, but there are long passages ofrich knock-outprose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of thepremiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense ofD.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself. ... Read more

Product Description

In the spring of 2003, Norman Mailer, who was then eighty years old, invited an improbable companion into his life: Dwayne Raymond, a young writer who was waiting tables at a restaurant in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, where Mailer spent most of his final years. Raymond became Mailer's aide in all matters professional and private, assisting the Pulitzer Prize–winning author on the four books he published during this time, including his last novel, The Castle in the Forest. As Raymond's responsibilities grew, so too did his closeness to Mailer, who in turn taught him how to navigate his own personal challenges.

Customer Reviews (22)

The Author's Final Years
For those familiar only with the manic, boozing, and pugnacious Mailer, this memoir reveals a very different Mailer. Perhaps a Mailer mellowed with age or a Mailer that no longer felt the need to create a persona. In any case, with stylistic grace and deep humanity, Raymond presents Mailer's final years, showing us an author dedicated to his craft, rarely complaining of infirmities, and touched with genius. During these years, Mailer completed his novel, THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST, and Raymond takes us through his writing and revising process for that book. But we also learn of other Mailer projects, some completed, some still in suspension. While Mailer's presence naturally fills the air of this book, readers get a good sense of Raymond, his own life and trials. Often, in such works, readers chafe at too much of the writer in the text, preferring attention to be focused on the main and famous character. It is a tribute to Raymond's fine sense of self that he manages to inhabit a place in the text that is at once assured and comfortable. We are drawn to Mailer, the lion in the den of his final years, but we are also rooting for Raymond. He does not disappoint.

Awe
I picked this book up at the library because I am reading Memoirs. Thought I would just flip through... not possible! This is such an incredible book in so many ways. What a gift Norman and his family and Dwayne have given each other, and now every reader. Just incredible writing. Dwayne is so 'real', tearing his heart for us. It is a book about writing, being a writer, unconditional love, being gay, relationships young and old. Even telling us how important it is to have a will!The book is still resonating with me, 3 days later. A comfort to know a great man and his loves. Thank you.

A great read from beginning to end and you'll be sorry it ends.
MORNINGS WITH MAILER IS A MUST READ.
It's a great book, a smooth documentary journey that
fills your eyes with illuminating images,
lets you smell the shared meals and the ocean just outside the bay window
and reveals the voices of a special man, his family, his employees and his friends.

Toward the end Islowed down because I didn't want it to end.

It's an autobiography, a memoir, the close-up look at the mind of a genius,
an idiosyncratic cookbook.
the story of a clan
and a love letter to Provincetown.

You'll find yourself talking out loud going Wow!!

The added value of Raymond's book is that it will make you smarter.

Mornings With Mailer
First-time author Dwayne Raymond delivers a remarkable book about his years with Norman Mailer.Raymond is in the unenviable position of introducing himself as a new writer while writing about his time with a famous one -- a gutsy move that works beautifully here.His portrait of Mailer - a memoir of the man at a particular time in his life - is vivid and moving, yet Raymond's own voice comes out strong without saturating the work in "me"-isms; we learn just enough about him to catch our interest and note him as a writer to watch, but the focus is always on Mailer, where it should be.Readers and writers will be fascinated by the chapters detailing Mailer's writing process; the Cape setting is memorably rendered.

an excellent gift
this great book is an excellent value on so many levels.it's a gentle story about the later years of a literary giant and his relationships to the world and the people around him. perfect for a weekend read at any place or time.

this book shares with the reader an inside view of a writers home and office in Provincetown, Massachusetts: the daily grind of a life fully enjoyed.

the cool book makes a wonderful thank you, host/hostess, bithday or any ocassion gift. ... Read more

Product Description
"Questions are posed," writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions." In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years.

Their wide-ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live in America today. John asks his father to look back to World War II, and explore the parallels that can—and cannot—be drawn between that time and our current post-9/11 consciousness.

As their conversations develop, the topics shift from the political to the personal to the political again, as they duck and weave around one another. They explore their shared admiration of boxing and poker, the nature of marriage and love, television, movies, writing, and what it means to be a part of this extraordinary family. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

bo
coming from a math/physics , obviously non-literary , background i was looking
for a nice overview of mailer's work.

unfortunatley, this is simply a series of conversations in the present ( circa2004) with his much younger son.includes a tremendous amount of anti-republican and
pro-democrat harping.even if you agree with him, it seems to wear thing pretty quickly.certainly mr mailer has more important and meaningful
work to display in a collection.


not much meat , or even potatoes, here

Twisted, Funky, Funny, Brilliant...
Mailer always manages to twist in a corkscrew of unexpected words and pop the BS cork off of a rich wine of pungent insight. Lots of fun.

Perhaps one of our few chances left...
Growing up in the sixties, I guess I took Norman Mailer for granted.
Boy, I'll never do that, again.
After all, there was a time when people like Mailer, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, actually had a regular column, each month, in places like Esquire magazine. And, people such as myself could count on brilliant, independent minds, capable of executing a great novel, providing periodic commentary on the times we were living in (through?). And, the books they wrote were still events: much read, much discussed, and looking back, they were actually what kept us, sane- at least those of us for whom sanity was a virtue.
But, tragically, those days are officially gone.
We now have any number of empty, babbling, pundits; essentially employees of General Electric, Westinghouse, Disney, News Corp and/or TimeWarner, whom we allow to define the day's agenda. What's left of the "culture", is divided up among television, movies, the Internet, and radio... probably in that order.
We actually have nothing left that can be referred to, with any seriousness, as a "culture". We just have different corporate entities using different means of entertainment with which they focus our attention on anything other than what it mean to be "alive" or truly "human". It's a very extraordinary, and extraordinarly dangerous period of history to be living in.
I remember someone on some talk show way back in the early 70's saying that "we're the last ones [that generation, not this] who will remember what it was "like".
Well, here is someone who not only remembers what it was like, but can still, at the age of 83, compare "it" to how it is now, and leave one grateful, shell-shocked, aching for a change of guard, and thanking one's lucky stars for the privilege.
Plus, apart from the conversation bewteen Mailer and his son, there is also an essay inserted right in the middle of the book which alone is worth the price. It is called "Myth Versus Hypothesis", and despite the pretentious title, it is one of the best pieces of political writing I've ever seen in my life. It was apparently delivered as the Keynote Address during Harvard's Commencement Ceremony in 2004. I have not been able to find it anywhere on the Internet, so I do not believe it was ever published elsewhere. I challenge anyone to produce anything comparable, which has appeared in recent years in any magazine, newspaper, etc.
Mailer has lived and learned quite a bit in his time. And I can not exaggerate the value of this gem for those of us who can still appreciate the "Real McCoy", or for those who who would genuinely like to briefly step out of their "Orgasmatron" and actually visit what was once the late, great planet Earth.
I once read that the great French novelist and mystic Romain Rolland carried a copy of Goethe's "Faust" with him at all times ("my constant companion") for his entire adult life. I'm not comparing this book to "Faust", or Mailer to Goethe, or suggesting to anyone that they do the same with it. But, I did recall that statement of Rolland's while reading "The Big Empty". Because it reminded me of how there a just a few rare indivifuals in any epoch that can really help make their age TRULY intelligible to their fellow travellors.
Norman Mailer proves that here... in spades.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Useless
This has to be the stupidest book I have read in a long time. I thought it might be a colorful look into the world of whites who immersed themselves into the black jazz scene in the 1940s and 50s. What I got was Norman Mailer doing some very weird and typically Jewish projecting psychoanalysis of these whites. Everything revolves around sex, tearing down society, criminal behaviour and psychopathology to these people in Mailers mind. While more often than not the white Jazz hipsters were complete misfits or just engaging in misguided rebellion Mailers reflections are so bizarre and perverse its almost humorous. The White Negro is totally uselss mental masterbation. ... Read more

Product Description
Alice Denham's lusty memoir is a juicy tell-all about a time when male writers were gods and an aspiring and gorgeous female novelist tries to win respect—and sometimes more. Caught between the sheets are James Dean, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis. The steam rises page by page as Denham—the only Playboy Playmate to have her fiction published in the same issue as her centerfold—chases her dream of writing as a young, oversexed beauty in the literary swirl of 1950s Greenwich Village, New York City. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Sex, Truth, and Books: The Apprenticeship of Alice Denham
SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is a provocative, titillating title, to be sure. Sex sells, and Alice Denham doesn't disappoint with this book. But the title doesn't tell the whole story, nor does it convey the book's abiding value. SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is nothing less than an eyewitness account of the unfolding of an era. Denham's personal memories of key writers frequently segue into keen literary criticism, while her travails as a woman author and model are firmly set against the burgeoning feminist movement of the 60s.

The cast list is jaw-dropping--James Dean, Marlon Brando, Hugh Hefner, James Jones, Philip Roth, Nelson Algren, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, David Markson, and Norman Mailer, just for starters. No, Denham didn't have sex with (quite) all of them, and if your prurient curiosity is getting the best of you, you'll have to read the book. Suffice it to say that these vividly-drawn characters play illuminating parts in Denham's bildungsroman. BAD BOYS relates a writer's apprenticeship in those heady days when literature still mattered, when American readers waited with bated breath for the elusive "Great American Novel."

Then as now, writers learned to support themselves while pursuing their craft, but options for women were limited. Denham hated modeling, especially scantily clothed or not at all, but it seemed a less time-consuming way to pay the bills than, say, shorthand. In 1956, she became the first and only woman to appear as a playmate centerfold in PLAYBOY and publish a short story in the same issue.

It was a stunt, of course, calculated to attract publishers to Denham's work. In that male-dominated age, a woman writer had to think on her feet, for "it was conventional wisdom that no woman could write fiction with the scope of a man." And while Denham remembers her male literary pals with affection, she doesn't write about them with unqualified nostalgia.

To her, Mailer, Roth, Heller, Gaddis, and their ilk were flawed men and flawed artists. "Alienation was the height of male literary chic," she observes. "A refusal to reach out, disguised as inescapable human frailty. Each in his own cell, in solitary. I called it megalomania, suffocating self-love. Whereas ordinary men and women did manage to get close, to know and touch and relate. Even if they failed to make it last. What these hotsy male writers knew about love was NADA."

In Denham's eyes, Katherine Anne Porter rose above those self-imposed limitations. Denham relates her tentative but moving friendship with the then-fading but still effervescent Southern short-story writer. This passage sweetly captures the thrill a young artist feels when being treated as a peer by a genius.

Otherwise, Denham's literary heroes were usually separated from her by time or space. She adored the poetry of T.S. Eliot, responded eagerly to Bernard Shaw's Life Force worship, and especially idolized Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who "combined character, theme, action, and plot movement ALL IN ONE SENTENCE. How I yearned, ached, to be able to do that." Denham embraces Dostoyevsky's spirit best when ruthlessly analyzing her own motives and shortcomings.

Along those lines, much of Denham book relates the writing and publication of her novel MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS, first printed in 1967 and recently reissued by Authors Guild Backinprint.com. One editor offered to show Denham how to make the book more "commercial." Denham turned him down, angry and offended. "If a novel was considered commercial," she explains, "that meant it was NOT literary. We serious writers disdained bestseller writers as a low breed. They were hacks, we were artists."

That was a false dichotomy, of course: "Later I realized I had turned down an opportunity to LEARN through arrogant youthful stupidity. Turned down a bird in hand for an empty bush. . . . We in those days believed literature equals truth, commercial equals crap. We smartasses. Life changes."

Life changed, indeed, during the 1960s, with the rise of feminism, and Denham threw herself into the movement wholeheartedly. Her own experiences as a woman artist--and, yes, a sex object--convinced her of the imperative of advancing women's rights. She wept with joy at the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 ROE V. WADE decision overturning state antiabortion laws, for she had personally endured the trauma of illegal abortion.

Her searing description of one such abortion should be required reading for anyone who remains undecided on the issue of choice. "The first pain scraped raw through me beyond pain," she writes, "appalling my entire body, stretching its range of sensations to the unbearable.... I was my own human sacrifice, killing part of myself to free the rest."

Someday, the sex and gossip of SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS will seem merely one facet in a rich and multi-faceted narrative, and Denham's book will be widely recognized as the important document it is. But don't wait till then to read it. Any college instructor teaching a survey course in 20th-century American literature (or, for that matter, 20th-century American culture in general) would be well advised to include it in the syllabus.

Boys and Girls Together
If you love the AMC TV series THE MAD MEN, with its highly stylized picture of Manhattan life circa 1960, you have to read this book!Alice Denham is a trip!"Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank."I haven't read any of her novels, but she can certainly spin a juicy tale.You have to admire her chutzpah, setting off from Jacksonville to hit New York during an era in which women were seen as inferior, especially writing women, and in fact they were often "not seen" at all--Denham refers to herself and others as "invisible women," after Ralph Ellison's classic novel INVISIBLE MAN.In a sense they were invisible even to other women, taught that marriage is the ultimate act of love and that a woman's destiny is to become a supportive wife to her husband.Other women were competition.Alice Denham does, however, sketch a memorable portrait of one fellow woman writer, the much older Katherine Anne Porter, with whom she became drinking pals."She was my literary guru, powerful as the ancient Aztec goddess of earth and fire, Coatlicue."

She has a long memory and never forgets a slight, nor has she forgotten the equipment of any man she ever knew..Somehow, fresh from college, Denham managed to find herself involved with many of the movers and shakers of New York culture of the period (roughly 1953 through 1965), when living in New York, she claims, was like Paris in the 1920s.I must correct an earlier reviewer of Denham's book.It was not James Dean who had the small "apparatus," no, his was perfectly average and OK--you're thinking of James Jones whose tiny little thumblike thing certainly did not send Miss Denham from here to eternity.(Though Jones made up for it in other ways!)The one bad boy who appears most often is Norman Mailer, whom oddly enough Denham never did sleep with.She is utterly convincing as a portraitist, with a gift for the telling physical characteristic; among other things her book might be used to reconstruct the physical likenesses of all her leading figures, even if all photographs, paintings, and films of them were to vanish in an instant.Jones had "an abnormally long head front to back while, incomprehensibly, his features were bunched together in the squalling center of his face."Don't you love the touch of that "squalling"?She's a poet from top to toe."William Gaddis looked New England Gothic, slight, rail-thin with a highboned narrow face, bony hands, yet an insinuating air."Here it's the word "yet" that does all the work, gives us Gaddis to the life.Naked, he's "only slightly muscled, but sporting a fine centerpiece

Throughout all the bedroom hijinx (in what other modernist's memoir will you find out that the late film composer Leonard Rosenman had a fondness for--well, I can't even say it on this family based website?) she never loses her throughline, which is her heartfelt attempt to write a great novel and then to get it published.Again and again she gets the rebuff from nasty male editors who just want her to continue with her career as a Playmate and/or to become a "hostess."Finally she gets somebody to believe in her wild vision and MY DARLING FROM THE LIONS gets published.In the meantime the guys she resents are often enough the ones who are great in bed.Evan S. Connell Jr was the king stud, "tall, noble, with strong perfectly proportioned features and observant eyes, black as his hair.The royal bearing of an Indian chieftain.Was he descended from Sacajawea and Chabonneau?"

In her slightly ironic style, Denham is sometimes so anxious to avoid four letter words that she gets a little cryptic, and some of her touches are sort of odd."As he passed me, Philip Roth tried to tweak my mound by ramming his paw into my lap."But all in all SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS is a masterpiece of wrath, tenderness, and compassion, and I predict it will someday outshine most of the "boy's books" that defined literature for Denham's generation.

Fantastic read!
An excellent retelling of her literary and sexual exploits during the 50s. Because she knew so many famous authors, it's also a fun look through a different angle of the beat generations history. The bits about James Dean and Norman Mailer are fun reads, as well as many others. Her writing is evocative and juicy, making the book a relatively quick read and a page-turner. It's all around a fun book to read, her life in the 50s was excellently publishable.

The way she writes about love and sex makes this book amazing and timeless, thanks to her friends and acquaintances, the literary heroes from the 50s, her interesting struggle to have her writing published, and her entertaining rift with Playboy. Not recommended for anyone looking for a literary history, but for any fan of the beat generation or looking for a good, fun read about past times.

Utterly absorbing from cover to cover and enthusiastically recommended.
Author Alice Denham, whose writings have appeared in "The New York Times", "New York" magazine, "Cosmopolitan", and "Playboy" (her fiction was published in the same issue as her centerfold) presents Sleeping With Bad Boys: A Juicy Tell-All of Literary New York in the Fifties and Sixties. Sleeping With Bad Boys lives up to its title and then some, offering lusty, sexy, between-the-sheets tell-alls about James Dean, Normain Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis. Though sensual elements are definitely a highlight, Sleeping With Bad Boys isn't all sex, all the time; chapters also tell of the author's road to maturity, and pivotal events in her life, from private family emergencies to the assassination of JFK. Written in an anecdotal style of brief, discrete passages that lend themselves to being read a little bit at a time or all at once, Sleeping With Bad Boys is utterly absorbing from cover to cover and enthusiastically recommended.

Carl
Her struggle to succeed in publishing her writing is admirable, but the titillating bits of sexual exploits though interesting detract from the main story. ... Read more