Date of Review:

08/20/2009

Published Work:

Reviewer:

Toni Bentley

Source:

The New York Times

Review Excerpt:

But if you want to know the real price of pleasure, ask the strippers, streetwalkers, Craigslist prostitutes, phone-sex operators, madams, pimps, drug addicts, porn stars and “performance artists” who offer themselves up in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, a collection of essays, vignettes, rants and poems, edited by David Henry Sterry (who wrote the very good 2002 memoir Chicken, about his life as a young hustler) and R. J. Martin Jr., the director of development for the SAGE Project (Standing Against Global Exploitation) in San Francisco, which offers support of all kinds for sex workers. While good girls require dinner, trips, “commitment” or even an engagement ring for sex, here is a book by those who simply get the cash upfront.

From the unappealing title, you might think this is a truly trashy paperback. Far from it: it’s an eye-opening, occasionally astonishing, brutally honest and frequently funny collection from those who really have lived on the edge in a parallel universe. Their writing is, in most cases, unpolished, unpretentious and riveting—but don’t worry, their tales are also graphic, politically incorrect, and mostly unquotable in this newspaper.

Link to Full Review:

Full Review