The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories

This was an entertaining book, especially for those of us with short attention spans. I found I learned about aspects of the world while reading about the people who influence them. The personalities and backgrounds on these pages are various and intriguing. I did feel some disjointedness when swinging from one story to the next. It felt a bit like Kennedy, after establishing the title story as the meat of the book, had rustled up several others in an attempt to plump up the page count. That said, I feel many of the stories were enjoyable and educational. ( )

This is a good book, but I will probably never read it again. Oddly enough I don't mean this in a bad way. I found the articles in it (most of them anyway) quick, enjoyable, fascinating, and educational. But this book feels like more of a jumping off point than something to return to. It has increased my interest in a number of topics, given me some extra bits of trivia to throw into conversations, and made me want to read more of Pagan Kennedy's work. (if only because she has a cool name.) It reads like a very good magazine, hardly coincidental as the articles had all been previously published in some form or other in magazines, and in that spirit I will be passing this book along to other people to read and enjoy and pass on, until it becomes dated and nobody cares anymore. ( )

Pagan Kennedy became a figure of interest as a 'zine publisher. The 'zine world now feels like a precusor to the blog world: a suggestion that it wasn't technology alone that drove the move to a certain spare prose style, episodic reportage, somewhat self-oriented musings such as that which goes for the best in blog writing now. The rise of "quirky" non-fiction, a world away from Sontag et al but perhaps not so far from independent journalism, coincides with this temperament of the times, and over the course of her career Kennedy's writing has shifted its focus well away from the sometimes self-consciously arch to a genuine fascination with figures whose eccentricity masks the ways in which they form miniature portraits of the cultures we inhabit now. Poised somewhere between This American Life and the goofy-seriousness of McSweeneys, these essays are diverting, somewhat ephemeral, literate, congenial. Nothing here to make your brain hurt. ( )

This was mostly a good read. I think the low point for me was the story about Conor Oberst (I couldn't buy the premise that he is a sentient being). The high point was Kennedy's autobiographical stories. I'm really looking forward to reading some of her other books. ( )

This book puts the serendipity of reading obituaries in the papers into book form. By this I mean that often when I chance on the obituaries I find out about someone I have never heard of who has had a very interesting life and one never knows who will be next. Pagan Kennedy writes about quirky and unusual people one would be unlikely to meet. Her choice of subjects is varied and her treatments sympathetic and the resulting book is fascinating and bears out the truism that fact is stranger than fiction. ( )