Pandering

From Publishers Weekly
Pretty much everything but the contents of that little black book makes an appearance in this painfully personal memoir-cum-photo-album from Hollywood Madame Fleiss. Court records, wiretap transcripts, facsimiles of seemingly any article that mentions her and incident reports from her two-year prison stint: by rifling through her past as one of America's oddball pseudo-celebrities, Fleiss attempts, as she asserts in a brief introduction, to create a book about "memory, style, culture, and politics, as much as anything else." The copious news clippings are intended to "provide the context, so that the truth of those times can live on," and there's a revealing fascination on Fleiss's part with the endless coverage about her. But the most intriguing documents are the ones that weren't public until this book's release-images and descriptions of Fleiss's fellow inmates, the tug of war Fleiss enacted with prison officials in order to be transferred to a federal boot camp program so she could get out of prison more quickly, the overcrowded halfway house she entered after prison. Fleiss also includes plenty of unrevealing musings ("they say there is nothing like a woman scorned...well nothing compares to the ego of a man"), justifications and recriminations (one section of the book is titled "Jealous and Angry Hookers") in a hodgepodge of commentary that's complemented by the book's cluttered design. With its promise of tell-all titillation, curious celeb-hounds won't be deterred by this media scrapbook's shortcomings. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
In a stunningly candid and courageous memoir, the notorious Hollywood Madam tells her own story for the first time. From a lucrative babysitting empire at the age of 13 to a global network of call girls and customers that stretched from Los Angeles to Kuwait, Heidi Fleiss built and ran the most glamorous and obscenely successful sex business in history. Her spectacular rise and fall captivated the country in the early 90’s, even as it terrified Hollywood’s power elite. Featuring original text, wiretap transcripts, court documents, news clippings, diary excerpts, interviews with hookers, and fantastic original artwork, Heidi tells her story with a fierce regard for the truth. At turns political, passionate, poignant, funny, sexy, angry, outrageous, and wise, Pandering is arguably the bravest and most provocative visual memoir ever published — a book that will make headlines all over again.


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Pretty much everything but the contents of that little black book makes an appearance in this painfully personal memoir-cum-photo-album from Hollywood Madame Fleiss. Court records, wiretap transcripts, facsimiles of seemingly any article that mentions her and incident reports from her two-year prison stint: by rifling through her past as one of America's oddball pseudo-celebrities, Fleiss attempts, as she asserts in a brief introduction, to create a book about "memory, style, culture, and politics, as much as anything else." The copious news clippings are intended to "provide the context, so that the truth of those times can live on," and there's a revealing fascination on Fleiss's part with the endless coverage about her. But the most intriguing documents are the ones that weren't public until this book's release-images and descriptions of Fleiss's fellow inmates, the tug of war Fleiss enacted with prison officials in order to be transferred to a federal boot camp program so she could get out of prison more quickly, the overcrowded halfway house she entered after prison. Fleiss also includes plenty of unrevealing musings ("they say there is nothing like a woman scorned...well nothing compares to the ego of a man"), justifications and recriminations (one section of the book is titled "Jealous and Angry Hookers") in a hodgepodge of commentary that's complemented by the book's cluttered design. With its promise of tell-all titillation, curious celeb-hounds won't be deterred by this media scrapbook's shortcomings. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.


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