Nothing Personal: The Business of Sex

by Donald McRae

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

448 pages

First published August 26, 1992

About the author

Donald McRae was born near Johannesburg in South Africa in 1961 and has been based in London since 1984.

He is the award-winning author of six non-fiction books which have featured legendary trial lawyers, heart surgeons and sporting icons. He is the only two-time winner of the UK’s prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year – an award won in the past by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Laura Hillenbrand’s Sea Biscuit. As a journalist he has won the UK’s Sports Feature Writer of The Year – and was runner up in the 2008 UK Sports Writer of the Year – for his work in the Guardian.

Donald lived under apartheid for the first twenty-three years of his life. The impact of that experience has shaped much of his non-fiction writing. At the age of twenty-one he took up a full-time post as a teacher of English literature in Soweto. He worked in the black township for eighteen months until, in August 1984, he was forced to leave the country. He is currently writing a memoir based on these experiences.

Reviews

[okyrhoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a pity that Donald McRae's writing - in this particular book - does not do justice to the subject matter. (He won the "William Hill Sports Book of the Year" award twice & taught English literature before switching to journalism.) It was impossible not to be irritated by the mixed metaphors and the transposition of emotional values onto inanimate entities to produce strained phrases, such as: "the veins standing out in purple welts", "the skin on the masochistic back of his body", "the Cross was an area of dark tumult", "he watched me through the filmy flare of smoke", "one reliable totem in the swirling storm of chaos which framed her dark nights out on the streets", "dinner with the gushingly Gish-flushed Greta", "a human dustbin fit only to be dumped on in some kind of raging wasteland", etc.
(And for a long-time sports writer, it's unfortunate that he mispells "Evil Kinevil.")
But I stuck it to the very end, hoping to find value in this unnecessarily lengthy 440-page book. I do believe that the main 'body' of the facts could have been adequately conveyed in half the space.
On the one hand, it's actually quite a relief that there is hardly any 'sociological' commentary. There is an unending stream of feminist tracts for/against prostitution analyzing the finer points of the subject (a few of which actually use this book as reference, eg. Sex, Work, and Sex Work & Consumption and the Management of Identity in Sex Work).
What impressed me in this volume is the realization that the subject of prostitution goes beyond issues of gender politics and gender power struggle. In the cases of gay escorts, boxing fists for hire, and teenage rent-boys portrayed in the second half of the book, one realizes that certain constructs regarding prostitution don't stand up to multifaceted complex social reality. It's refreshing - if such a thing can be said about the matter - to read about the male 'professionals' in the prostitution industry and their varying experiences.
But here, too, the faults of the investigative journalism are evident. I wish McRae would include additional material on the male prostitute profiles. While the author provides ample background information on the pre-prostitution personal (and yet stereotypical) 'histories' of the female prostitutes, those type of details (& motivations) are glossed over in the most glaring example of exploitation, that of the underage & sometimes homeless boys "selling butt" in the public lavatories of railway stations. Whether McRae respectfully refrains from overstepping into the Fassbinder wanna-be Matti McLean's documentary film project, or whether he honestly doesn't know how to interpret these kids' activities, it's here where the most problematic aspects of prostitution are staring him (and us) in the face. Like Matti's romanticizing on the beauty of these youths, McRae does not appear curious to pursue a more comprehensive understanding on this particularly disturbing social phenomenon. Instead, he returns to Mandy, his original source, and closes the investigation with her 'retirement.'
And so, even after 440 pages, I feel there is more that remains to be documented & understood...
[For hyperlinks, see my original review http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/3... ]

[Adrienne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read. I am wondering what, if anything, has changed in 15 years since the publishing of this book. It seems as though the 15 years prior to the book also had seen many changes.

I liked how everything was woven together. I expected chapters that were their own microchasm with no relation to each other except for the overall theme. But each level wrapped into each other. Some were obvious literary devices, but others seemed serendipity.