CRAWLSPACE by Herbert Lieberman

PUBLISHER: David McKay Company, 1971
GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: "northern suburb", USA
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

FROM PUBLISHER: Albert and Alice Graves live a normal, if monotonous, domestic life. They’ve never had children; they spend their days tending to their home and enjoying their time together. One day, when the oil man, Richard, is refilling their furnace, Alice invites him to dinner, never suspecting that a casual act of charity will lead to a horrifying, morbid discovery in the crawlspace underneath their beloved house.

The Graves take Richard into their lives, becoming attached to his presence as though to the son they never had. Their town, though, is not nearly so welcoming. When the locals lash out against the Graves and their strange houseguest, the contented household is irrevocably drawn into a darkness they could not have imagined.

MY THOUGHTS: This takes place in the USA but the state isn't given. It's a very dull and boring story that had so much potential. None of it makes any sense and there's no point to it. Richard's an odd character, eighteenish, and for some unknown reason lives in their crawlspace and even poops in there like an animal. He doesn't seem to have much social skills and is just strange. I neither like nor dislike him.

What I don't like at all is how the Graves, who are near sixty years old, take him in and treat him like a son, like he's someone they've known forever. They know he's odd as hell and still let him into their home to live? Only in fiction.

This book is filled with the type of characters I hate; small town police officers who like to cause trouble, troubled youth who get away with causing mischief and harassing others, and they all speak with horrible grammar, that is everyone except the main characters.

The end was puzzling, with the appearance of Richard's father. No clue why he showed up since he's been a deadbeat dad Richard's whole life. It would have made more sense to have inserted him into the story midway. Maybe then it would have done something for the plot, maybe would have made us sympathize with Richard more. I don't like having to wait until the end of the story to get some background information on Richard. Now I know why he has abandonment issues.

The 1972 made-for-TV movie is more boring than the book but that was to be expected. The three main characters were older than they should have been.

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN by Patricia Highsmith, Book vs. Film

PUBLISHER: Harper and Brothers, 1950
GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
SETTING: USA
WIKI: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A-
READ: 6/2018, 4/2020

FROM PUBLISHER: Guy Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, and Charles Anthony Bruno, a conniving psychopath who manipulates a chance encounter with Guy into a sadistic plot to swap murders. “Some people are better off dead,” says Bruno, “like your wife and my father, for instance.” As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy becomes trapped in Patricia Highsmith’s perilous world, where under the right circumstances anyone is capable of murder.

MY THOUGHTS/SPOILERS:

Guy's from Texas but lives in New York. He has dark hair and is 29. He's been separated from his 23 year old wife for three years and she's in Texas. She's pregnant by her boyfriend, Owen Markham.

Charles Bruno, who goes by 'Bruno' throughout the entire book, is a 25 year old blond and slightly overweight alcoholic who has wealthy parents, with the money being from his mother's side of the family. He's from New York. He dropped out of Harvard during his second year and doesn't currently work. He hates his father for not giving him money and for cheating on his mother multiple times. His parents may own Bruno Transforming Company, and they make AC-DC gadgets. He's drunk in most of the novel.

Needless to say Bruno is seriously disturbed. He admitted to himself that he likes crises and creating them. He thinks the planning of Miriam's demise gives him a sense of purpose and will fulfill a desire once she's gone. He's even thought about suicide. He misperceives things and believes that Guy is his friend early on when they barely know each other. When Guy wants nothing to do with him he says he was 'used' by Guy, when he wasn't at all. When he feels he's been rejected by Guy he seems to have a mental breakdown. His character's so much more fleshed out in the novel. He's more whiny too, and has outbursts. It's assumed by some, myself included, that he's gay, based on his obsession with Guy and always wanting to be near. Bruno's a character who definitely needed his backstory told and I don't know why it wasn't. We only know he's a mama's boy who likes to stay drunk.

Guy really tried his best to cut Bruno out of his life but in the end, gave in. Oddly, he began to see Bruno as a friend near the end of the novel when before, he couldn't stand to be around him. He got real loose-lipped too, which made no sense.

Anne is blonde in the book and brunette in the film. She's extremely bland. There's a scene where Bruno sends her an anonymous letter telling her that Guy knows more about Miriam's death than anyone knows. She asks Guy about it and doesn't seem at all concerned when Guy denies it. She's pretty nonchalant in regard to Bruno and I feel she should have been suspicious of him always showing up uninvited or inviting himself places. Anne is different in the film, brighter. Based on not much of anything other than similarities in her sister's eyeglasses and Miriam's, she figured out Miriam's murder. Someone else figured it out in the novel, a detective named Arthur Gerard.

After Miriam's death in the film, the similarities between book and film pretty much end. I wish I knew why the film was so different. The film doesn't show how much Guy cares for Anne. It doesn't delve into Bruno's obsession with Guy, with not letting him go after the bad deeds are done. In the film Bruno's cigarette lighter plays a part but not in the novel. The film has nothing at all on the novel. Novel spans over 1 1/2 years.

I haven't been real excited while reading a book in awhile. I loved this except for the last twenty pages. I had no thoughts on how the story would end and I'm not happy with it at all. A little more thought should have gone into it and one of the two things wasn't believable.

Film spoilers here.
Novel spoilers here.

RAGE by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

PUBLISHER: Signet, 9/1977
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: Maine, USA, May 1976
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: F

FROM PUBLISHER: A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence.

MY THOUGHTS: This is one shitty novella, around 130 pages, that's told from Charlie's point of view and only spans a few hours. The dialogue and student actions are totally unbelievable. Prime example, a girl said this after Charlie shot two teachers in the classroom, "Go Charlie! Fuck 'em all!" A boy asked him, after the first shooting, I believe it was, if he could do his homework. In the midst of it all two girls got into a verbal fight, calling each other whores and cunts. And about three times Charlie mentioned circle jerks, which, I won't lie, made me chuckle. One of the girls told of some sexual encounter in front of the class. WTF?! And the strangest and second most disturbing scene of all is towards the end when the class turned on one male student for no reason that I could see. The students held hostage seem to be as unstable as Charlie. Charlie even let one girl leave the classroom to go to the bathroom....and the fool came back instead of fleeing. To be completely honest, I disliked most of the students so much I was hoping he'd kill 'em all at the end. There really aren't any likable characters.

I'm not sure what sent Charlie down a murderous path. He said in chapter one that two years previous he began to lose his mind. We weren't privy to what was going through his mind then. He thinks his father hates him and he recited an incident to his class that happened when he was four and his father threw him onto the ground for breaking the windows. He seems to have had a basic childhood and is a virgin (and told a story about it to the class). Just a few months before the shootings, Charlie beat the chalkboard in chemistry class with a pipe wrench until it crumbled then hit his chemistry teacher, Mr. Carlson, in the head with it and fractured his scull.

The only part I liked at all was when Charlie reminisced in chapter 29 about a near physical altercation with his father while telling him off.

I've posted some images from inside the The Bachman Books here.

This story is also available as one of four stories in The Bachman Books, which can be found under the following ISBN's only: 9780451147363, B001IPV91A, 9780450392498, and 9780452257740, which is the version I have.

The current in-print edition doesn't contain this story but still has the other three. Rage as part of The Bachman Books went out of print in 1998 after a December 1997 U.S. school shooting so any version with a publication date after that won't contain this story.

I like the original cover a lot but Charlie looks much older than seventeen. In the 1983 edition with the yellow cover here, he definitely looks like a teenager.

Here are a few good reviews/articles on the novel at: Devouring Texts, Dead End Follies, Sharp Pencil, Between the Covers, The Guardian, 

School shooters/hostage takers inspired/possibly inspired by "Rage": Jeff Cox, Jeff Cox 2, Dustin Pierce, Dustin Pierce 2, Scott Pennington, Scott Pennington 2, Scott Pennington 3, Barry Loukaitis, Michael Carneal.

Here's how Stephen-writing-as-Bachman was exposed.

CRASH INTO ME: A SURVIVOR'S SEARCH FOR JUSTICE by Liz Seccuro

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA, 1/2011
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: B+

FROM PUBLISHER: In September 2005, Liz Seccuro's world turned upside down when she received an apology letter from the man who had raped her twenty-two years earlier. The rape, which occurred when she was a seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia, was reported to the campus police, but their inquiry led nowhere. The man accused of raping her left the university soon after, and Seccuro tried to put the incident behind her, starting a business and a family, but like all survivors of trauma, the memory was never far from the surface.

The letter brought it all back. Seccuro bravely began an e-mail correspondence with her rapist to try to understand what happened, and why. As the correspondence continued, Seccuro found the courage to do what should have been done all those years earlier-prosecute him. She began appearing on national television and radio to talk about the case. Several crime dramas and a John Grisham novel, The Associate, were based on her experience. She had found a way to end a terrible story, but once judicial proceedings began, she found that what she thought occurred at that UVA frat party was only the tip of the iceberg. The investigation revealed at least two other assailants, numerous onlookers, and a wall of silence among the fraternity members that persisted two decades later.

MY THOUGHTS: I learned of Liz on an episode of I.D.'s Vanity Fair Confidential, Season 4, episode 1 titled Shadows on the Lawn. This is a well-written and easy to follow memoir about injustice-turned-justice, but barely.

Liz was at a frat party one night in 1984, a party she didn't even want to go to and only went to as a favor for her male friend, and was given a tart green-colored drink that was obviously drugged. She was there mentally at times but had trouble moving her limbs and was fading in and out of consciousness. She was carried into a bedroom and the lights were turned out and she was raped, and raped in another room by another male, and was raped digitally on the sofa by a third male while a few other men looked on. She's not sure what order this all happened in. She wasn't a rape victim who stayed silent. She did what she could at the time of the assault, October 1984, to see that her attacker was punished but was unsuccessful. Right after the rape she walked to the UVA medical center to tell them she was raped and was told by a nurse that they don't handle rape victims there, which makes no sense at all, and the nurse told her to go to another hospital far away. She was lied to right to her face several times by the disgusting male dean of UVA, Robert Canevari, about who had legal jurisdiction over the college. She was told the university had to deal with the situation themselves, not the Charlottesville police, which was a complete lie. The scumbag, who's hopefully six feet under now, tried to make her think she wasn't raped and just had a bad date and he even told her parents, right in front of her, that she was 'date raped', which wasn't true because there was no date. He suggested she transfer to another school and told her he had 'contacts' who could help with it. He'd already had the rapist, William Beebe, leave the school, thinking that would solve the problem and Liz would drop her complaint. Dean Canevari never even took a report of her story. In fact, several others didn't either. They just wanted to sweep the situation under the rug.

I have a bone to pick with her friends too. Lots of them came to her dorm room to comfort her but none of them offered to take her to a hospital.

Justice wasn't really served because William only spent five months in prison, due to Virginia not having a statute of limitations on rape, and the other two men who raped her got away with it because they wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement and by that point it had been twenty-two or three years since it happened.

Liz is very likable and very open about her ordeal and her struggle with panic attacks. I do think the book needed to be longer and I'd have liked more details on her first marriage at age twenty-three and I definitely wanted to read more of her correspondence with William Beebe. It needed information on how her parents were dealing with it over the years.

MURDER AT BEECHWOOD by Alyssa Maxwell

PUBLISHER: Kensington, 5/2015
GENRE: Historical Fiction/Mystery
SETTING: Rhode Island, USA, 1896
SERIES: Gilded Newport Mysteries, #3
AUTHOR SITE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B-

FROM PUBLISHER: For Newport, Rhode Island’s high society, the summer of 1896 brings lawn parties, sailboat races…and murder. Having turned down the proposal of Derrick Andrews, Emma Cross has no imminent plans for matrimony—let alone motherhood. But when she discovers an infant left on her doorstep, she naturally takes the child into her care. Using her influence as a cousin to the Vanderbilts and a society page reporter for the Newport Observer , Emma launches a discreet search for the baby’s mother.

One of her first stops is a lawn party at Mrs. Caroline Astor’s Beechwood estate. But an idyllic summer’s day is soon clouded by tragedy. During a sailboat race, textile magnate Virgil Monroe falls overboard. There are prompt accusations of foul play—and even Derrick Andrews falls under suspicion. Deepening the intrigue, a telltale slip of lace may link the abandoned child to the drowned man. But as Emma navigates dark undercurrents of scandalous indiscretions and violent passions, she’ll need to watch her step to ensure that no one lowers the boom on her…

MY THOUGHTS: Let me start by saying this book has way too many characters, around twenty, most introduced within the first fifty pages. Most weren't even in the picture much. By the end of the book I still wasn't 100% sure who was who and had to keep looking at my notes to help me figure things out.

There were multiple mysteries going on at the same time, too many- who, if anyone, caused the explosion on the boat, who dropped the baby off at Emma's doorstep, who shot a carriage driver, who shot a maid, and so on. I was interested in all of it. The person(s) who did the crimes, or some of them, just wasn't believable. At least not to me. The motive(s) presented were ridiculous too.

Emma's character is too perfect, flawless actually, and she's clearly a genius at solving crimes, all on her own, and without help from another soul. Sure. I didn't get any backstory on her and that's very necessary for a main character. I realized that was probably given in book one of the series but the author should have recapped in the next two. I don't even know how old she is or what she looks like.

The book is flawed, I never really got to know any of the characters, but I was kept interested and was disappointed in the climax for being far-fetched. Emma's not a character I'd want to keep reading about because she's been written as someone I can't relate to.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK: ONE WOMAN'S OBSESSIVE SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER by Michelle McNamara

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins, 2/2018
GENRE: Nonfiction/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

FROM PUBLISHER: For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

MY THOUGHTS: Michelle's a great writer and I like her style and humor at times but she got off track quite a bit. I've been following this case since 2001 and she didn't do it justice. I liked the autobiographical parts a lot but most of it wasn't relevant to this case. As I feared, this was very much The Story of Michelle McNamara. There should have been background information on all of the victims, not just one. We got more on Michelle's than we did theirs. Example: So much time was spent on Cheri's failing relationship with her daughter which is fine, I genuinely like hearing about it and can related to it to a degree, but an equal amount of time should have been spent on telling us about Cheri's own background. I learned nothing at all about her childhood, and nothing about the childhood of most of the other victims, including Brian and Katie Maggoire. The story of the victims took a back seat to her own, which is such a shame because that's not how this should have been.

The crimes are out of order and instead of starting with the first rape in 1976 she jumps to a murder in 1981 and I can't figure out why. It's disjointed as hell. In the middle of a story about one of the crimes she'd get off track and start talking about the town it happened in. Back to the story, please.

Too many unimportant things were added, possibly to fill space, like pages dedicated to cleared suspects. Too bad the two guys who helped finish writing it, Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen, couldn't have cleaned it up more. I suspect they weren't allowed to mess with it too much. I don't see where they were thanked in the book by her husband Patton or the publisher.

One thing I found odd was her mentioning an issue a rape victim had with something a former investigator said about her in his book Sudden Terror. Why bring their drama to your own book? None of that is relevant to your book and it doesn't involve you. It was only done to try and shame Larry Crompton.

I don't think this book would have been published had she not been married to a celebrity. It seems rushed and unfinished and not too interesting. I don't think someone new to this case will care much about it, after reading this. I think a casual reader of true crime wouldn't be compelled by what they've read in this book to look into the other books about this criminal. To be honest, it's not as good as a few of the self-published ones on this case. This is the only book of the lot to have been published by a major publisher and it's a big disappointment because I know it could have been so much better.

I've uploaded some images from the book here.

Other nonfiction books on this case, listed in order of publication are:

Sudden Terror by Larry Crompton, detective on case

Hot Prowl by Jack Gray

Frozen in Fear by Jane Carson-Sandler, victim #5

Hunting a Psychopath by Richard Shelby, detective on case

Murder on His Mind by Anne Penn, relative of Lyman Smith

Case Files of the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer by Kat Winters and Keith Komos (the best of the bunch)

Fiction- Terror at 3am: When PTSD Turns Deadly by Duane Wilson


I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

OUR GUYS: THE GLEN RIDGE RAPE AND SECRET LIFE OF THE PERFECT SUBURB by Bernard Lefkowitz

PUBLISHER: Vintage, 4/1998
PURCHASE: link
BOOK IMAGES: link
MY GRADE: A

FROM PUBLISHER: In March 1989 a group of teenage boys lured a retarded girl into a basement in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, and gang-raped her. Glen Ridge was the kind of peaceful, affluent suburb many Americans dream about. The rapists were its most popular high school athletes. And although rumors of the crime quickly spread through the town, weeks passed before anyone saw fit to report it to the police.

What made these boys capable of brutalizing a girl that some of them had known since childhood? Why did so many of their elders deny the rape and rally around its perpetrators? To solve this riddle, the Edgar award-winning author Bernard Lefkowitz conducted years of research and more than two hundred interviews. The result is not just a wrenching story of crime and punishment, but a hauntingly nuanced portrait of America's jock culture and the hidden world of unrestrained adolescent sexuality.

MY THOUGHTS: This was very good and well-researched, but the author was long-winded at times when it came to details about the town's history. I feel it was a bit disjointed too. "Leslie Faber", a pseudonym, was born in 1971 in Canada and was adopted as a baby by a New Jersey couple. Like Leslie, most of the defendants were seniors in high school.

While the males involved in the "rape" are without a doubt scumbags, I don't believe "Leslie" was raped. She was definitely taken advantage of by males she thought were her friends, whom she's known most of her life. From what I understand of her she doesn't like to upset people and will say whatever she feels they want to hear. 1 1/2 years before this rape, at age 16 her IQ was tested at 49-51, the level of a second or third-grader. It was frustrating reading about her testimony because of how often she changed her story but I understand why she did it-she didn't want the guys to get in trouble and still thought they were her friends, though they never were to begin with. All they ever did was pick on her.

I'd say Kevin's the most disturbed one out of the bunch. He'd take his penis out and masturbate in class in front of people and teachers even saw him with his hand down his pants masturbating and they did nothing at all. According to this he's a registered sex offender in Florida as of 2011.

Second most disturbed one is Chris Archer, who was a junior in high school in 1989. He's described as having pale blue eyes and light brown hair. He'd call Leslie at home sometimes in high school and tell her he was "jerking off." He'd call sometimes to ask her to meet him at a nearby neighborhood botanical garden that had two sheds on the property. She'd meet him there occasionally and later said they "fool around" there. Exactly what that entailed wasn't mentioned. Leslie being on the level of a second or third-grader is what makes Chris' actions disturbing.

Aside from the case itself, the most disturbing thing that's happened, that we know of, is that in 2005, Richie Corcoran shot his estranged wife and her boyfriend, then shot himself. He died and they survived.

The author died in 2014 so there's no asking him for updates on any of the people.

I've uploaded images from the book here.

Reading material:

This person claims that this case never existed in the first place.

You can read a brief article from 1994 here.

Read an excerpt of the book here.

Read someone's write-up here.

FAVORITE COOKIES: More Than 40 Recipes for Iconic Treats by William-Sonoma

PUBLISHER: Weldon Owen, 4/2017
GENRE: Cooking/Baking
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: C

FROM PUBLISHER: This comprehensive collection of over 3 dozen cookie recipes provides all the much-loved classics, along with tips and variations on how to make them unique. The beautifully photographed volume will feature recipes for holiday and gift giving, but will also include drop cookies, bars & sandwich cookies. The recipes are simple enough to be understood by beginning bakers, and share a timeless quality that will make them cherished by cooks of all levels. The recipes are the type home cooks will return to again and again.

Whether you’re an avid baker or a novice, the experts at the Williams-Sonoma Test Kitchen have you covered. Inside this inspiring volume, you'll find 37 recipes for all types of cookies, including drop cookies, holiday cookies, sandwiched cookies, and bar cookies. Step-by-step photography and instructions illustrate how to roll out dough, cut cookie shapes, and decorate with panache.

Drop Cookies: Chocolate Chip; Peanut Butter; Oatmeal Raisin; Cowboy; Coconut, Butterscotch, and Macadamia; Chocolate Crinkle.

Holiday Cookies/Gift Giving Cookies: Sugar; Gingersnap Molasses; Gingerbread molasses; Spritz; Snickerdoodle; Candy Cane; Peppermint bark; Thumbprints; Meringues; Florentines; Almond Crescent.

Sandwich Cookies: Chocolate pretzel and peanut butter sandwich cookie; Lemon cream cookie sandwiches; Homemade Oreos

Bars: Blondie; Toffee Triangles; Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Brownie Bars; 7-Layer Bar; S’more Brownie; Orange Creamsicle.

THINGS I'VE MADE

PERFECT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

These cookies taste alright but they aren't perfect. They're ordinary and the doughballs didn't spread much at all. I had to flatten the rest of the unbaked balls with the back of a measuring cup. I won't be making these again and mine look nothing like the ones in the book. They're like two different cookies.

Using a 1.5" diameter/1T. scoop I got 53 doughballs. I used 1c. mini semisweet chocolate chips and 1 1/4 c. toasted and chopped pecans.

OATMEAL-RAISIN COOKIES

These are very good and the recipe is basic. They use rolled oats and both types of sugar, white and brown.

LEMON CREAM SANDWICH COOKIES

I didn't make the lemon filling because I don't like cream cheese so I just used raspberry jam. This cookie dough was very easy to work with and is in fact the best roll-out dough I've ever worked with. Unfortunately it's basically the same as a shorbread cookie and the baked cookie is crumbly and the cookies soften a lot, even in an air-tight container. For that reason alone I wouldn't make these again because I don't like a soft cookie. I got 32 2" sandwich cookies.

MY THOUGHTS: I'm not at all impressed with this cookbook. Only one of the three recipes I made turned out good. Most of the cookies look unappetizing.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

DEVIL'S IN THE DETAILS by Jennifer Paige, 2017

WIKIPEDIA

STILL HUNGRY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: MY STORY by Richard Simmons

PUBLISHER: GT Publishing Corporation, 9/1999
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir
AUTHOR SITE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A-

FROM PUBLISHER: On a sweltering New Orleans evening in 1948, Shirley Simmons, eight-and-a-half-months pregnant, had an overwhelming craving for Chinese food. But she would never get the eggroll she'd longed for; she went into labor in the restaurant. Sixteen hours later, her youngest son Milton T. Simmons was born. And so begins the saga of fitness guru Richard Simmons and his lifelong love affair with food. Along the way he's helped millions of Americans with their battle of weight loss. Many know him through his groundbreaking infomercial products like Deal-A-Meal, Get Down the Pounds, and his exciting new Move, Groove, and Lost program. Still more have enjoyed his best-selling low-fat cookbooks Farewell to Fat and Sweetie Pie.

MY THOUGHTS/SUMMARY: What's not to like about Richard Simmons?! He has such a good nature. The book is pretty well-written and full of his trademark humor. He seems to be a very good-hearted person who has done so much for a lot of people, including many he's never even met. Examples would be him calling strangers who've written him letters and arranging doctor appointments for obese people in crisis. He maintains relationships with some of those people as of the book's publication in 1999.

He didn't have that great of a relationship with his father when he was young. His father seemed annoyed by him and saw him as the source of any discord between he and his wife. They got closer as Richard got older. His father Leonard was fifty years old when Richard was born. He's always had an excellent relationship with this mother, Shirley. His older brother Lenny wasn't mentioned too much in here but Richard seems to get along fine with him. The only relative Richard's ever known is his father's brother, Milton. Milton paid for Richard to go to college. Milton died around 1969.

Richard's been an overeater since he was very young. He was teased for it by boys at school so he naturally bonded with females since they didn't pick on him. He began taking diet pills around sixth grade, pills he'd get from his female friends, who got them from their own mothers. He took laxatives that were in the form of chocolate (Exlax or similar brand) and was also bulimic for awhile. He stopped taking diet pills when his heart rate got very fast and it scared him. In his late teens-early twenties, after receiving an anonymous note on his car's windshield telling him he needed to lose weight (he was well over 200lbs and he's 5'7"), he became anorexic. He once passed out and went to the hospital. He worked at a resturant and when he was twenty-two, a female coworker taught him how to be bulimic, so he gave that a try. During a doctor visit he somehow knew Richard had been purging and he told him how bad it was for his health, so Richard stopped it. He got his act together and started eating healthy and exercising. He opened up his own exercise studio in 1974/75, before he was famous.

A sad story is he had a client named Ellen, a petite woman with a young-sounding voice. She had a job making teddy bears. Richard noticed she kept getting thinner and thinner but he never asked her about it. She didn't show up to his class a few times and he didn't know how to get in touch with her. One day he went to a place that sold her handmade bears to inquire about her. He was told she died from anorexia. After that he got the idea to start exercise class thirty minutes early so he and the class could discuss diet, health, and any other issues they wanted to talk about. He even got anonymous letters from the women with topic suggestions.

A funny story would be that when Richard was in seventh grade or so, he'd steal the heads off of Barbie dolls and store them in a drawer in his bedroom. His father was snooping and found them one day.

Richard never mentioned dating anyone at all so that part of his personal life was left out completely, which is too bad and it's why I didn't give the book an A+.

Richard's comment about being out of the closet here.

I've uploaded some photos from inside the book here.

Missing Richard Simmons podcast here.

Richard on left with older brother, Lenny.