Book Review: Beneath Contempt And Happy To Be There – The
Fighting Life Of Porn King Al Goldstein by Jack Stevenson [2011 Headpress]
I bought a
tablet to read books while at work.
I had the kind of job where staying awake all night was part of the job description, but having a laptop open was kind of prohibitive.
I bought a 64 Gig chip so I could load it up with books and plug it into the tablet so I’d have books to read.
I’m not entirely against services like Kindle and cloud storage, but I like to have my own copies of the files I’m reading so I can manipulate them if I so desire.
I downloaded around 2,200 books from authors that I knew I liked.
I had the kind of job where staying awake all night was part of the job description, but having a laptop open was kind of prohibitive.
I bought a 64 Gig chip so I could load it up with books and plug it into the tablet so I’d have books to read.
I’m not entirely against services like Kindle and cloud storage, but I like to have my own copies of the files I’m reading so I can manipulate them if I so desire.
I downloaded around 2,200 books from authors that I knew I liked.
Here’s a screenshot of my list of authors in case you were interested in
knowing the kind of authors and content I’m interested in.
In addition to wanting what I knew I liked, I also wanted to browse around and see if there was anything available I might be interested in.
It’s tough to find the kind of books I’m interested in reading because when you try to browse e-books, the most popular search results are self-improvement, cookbooks, and textbooks and training manuals.
Not that I’m not interested in learning a foreign language.
I’m glad that the resources are available on the relatively open internet, but the most popular books don’t make for fun reading.
Clicking past
the first few dozen pages, I started to find and download things I might be
interested in checking out someday.
Beneath Contempt And Happy To Be There – The Fighting Life Of Porn King Al Goldstein by Jack Stevenson was one of those books.
First and foremost, it’s a solid book, but not very well written.
A good editor would have been able to shave off a few thousand unnecessary words and make a tighter book and a better read.
The basic chronological biographical narrative form is adhered to, but the prose is full of pathos and bathos and unnecessary hyperbole.
For example, “(…) Death sank faster than a corpse with cement overshoes.”
“He was as American as apple pie and ambulance chasing lawyers…” and “His paperwork was wending its way through the system…” are clumsy usage of figures of speech.
And I’m pretty sure “Al grabbed a handful of cigars and rushed to the frontline to meet them.” and “At his peak cabbies, waiters, construction workers, window cleaners and garbage men hanging from the sides of sanitation trucks shouted in jubilation when they saw him passing in the streets.” are exaggerations at best.
Questionable language choices aside, the book kept my attention until the last arc when Al lost everything and was homeless in Manhattan.
The author laid the pathos on too thickly and I skimmed through to the end of the book.
The story itself was interesting to me as someone that has started a few of his own businesses and the pictures from the “golden” age of pornography and New York’s 42nd Street
Although not a great example of contemporary American literature, it helped a boring work shift to go by a little faster and if it’s the kind f thing you’re interested in, it’s worth picking up and checking out.
Beneath Contempt And Happy To Be There – The Fighting Life Of Porn King Al Goldstein by Jack Stevenson was one of those books.
First and foremost, it’s a solid book, but not very well written.
A good editor would have been able to shave off a few thousand unnecessary words and make a tighter book and a better read.
The basic chronological biographical narrative form is adhered to, but the prose is full of pathos and bathos and unnecessary hyperbole.
For example, “(…) Death sank faster than a corpse with cement overshoes.”
“He was as American as apple pie and ambulance chasing lawyers…” and “His paperwork was wending its way through the system…” are clumsy usage of figures of speech.
And I’m pretty sure “Al grabbed a handful of cigars and rushed to the frontline to meet them.” and “At his peak cabbies, waiters, construction workers, window cleaners and garbage men hanging from the sides of sanitation trucks shouted in jubilation when they saw him passing in the streets.” are exaggerations at best.
Questionable language choices aside, the book kept my attention until the last arc when Al lost everything and was homeless in Manhattan.
The author laid the pathos on too thickly and I skimmed through to the end of the book.
The story itself was interesting to me as someone that has started a few of his own businesses and the pictures from the “golden” age of pornography and New York’s 42nd Street
Although not a great example of contemporary American literature, it helped a boring work shift to go by a little faster and if it’s the kind f thing you’re interested in, it’s worth picking up and checking out.
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