Customer Reviews

My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Frank Harris' tale begins with his humble origins and voyage to America culminating in financial reward and subsequent return to England. His bravado and financial capability open Harris to a world of erotic pleasure, voyage, gourmandise and to a number of encounters with interesting people of his era. Frank Harris stood by his friend Oscar Wilde until the latters' demise. Faithful both financially and compassionately, Harris is a hands down man of the world and lover of humanity. I read this book thirty years ago to much pubescent excitation and reread it a while back as a father of four and earnest husband. The effect was the same; interesting lives make for interesting people and VICE versa.

I really don't know how many of My Life and Loves volumes have been sold worldwide but it seems to me that most of my friends in different countries all found this book in their dads library and usually well hidden behind other books.....

The five volume book of almost 1000 pages is a faboulous look into 19th century world and a compendium of famous and not so famous people of the era ,,,

Not only does the author deal with socio-economic and religious thoughts and beliefs of the time but he takes the dryness out of historial perspective by peppering the book with numerous erotic escapades of the tenderest nature ....

If all history books were as good as this one I would have certainly gotten a PHd in History .....

This book is a MUST HAVE for your erotic library ... AND it's one of the few classic erotics that will NEVER go out of print!

A racy,raunchy but immensely readable autobiography of Frank Harris.Harris is a consummate story-teller & raconteur with a vivid style.An energetic and accomplished dilletante he recounts his childhood in stuffy Victorian England groping underneath a skirt at the first available opportunity ("her bottom was like a warm marble"!) to his trip across the pond to America ,where he worked as a cowboy,clerk and lawyer among other things.He had an amazing memory and acquired a lot of erudition,seemingly effortlessly.Anecdotes of Ruskin,Randolph Churchill,Rodin among a score of others are sprinkled liberally .His refreshing honesty,contempt for humbug & hypocrisy along with boundless energy and optimism makes this a great read.It makes for a leisurely read and is best savored during the hot, long summer after dinner___ over a cigar!

Very well written books with a few stories on his erotic encounters, but do not be disappointedto find more about his encounters with famousand capable men and women of the 19th century. It gives an enthralling insight in victorian and edwardian life in English high society.This is the best book I know of that does just that.

I read this book over 40 years ago and wanted to refresh my memory. Although it is erotic it also is a depiction of life in the 19th and early 20th centuries in England and the U.S. The author was obviously a well educated person and a bit boastful but the descriptions of life are most vivid. I saw a movie of part of the book and it starred Jack Lemmon playing the part of Frank Harris. I loved the story!!

I have read this wonderful erotic book when I was a teen. This book made me dream of the opposite sex so badly and it made me grow up so paifully, impatiently and anxiously, and also gave me lot of day dreams. This was a journey of the life of a gentleman who met so many different and wonderful women under different kind of situations and at different levels. All the descriptions were so intimate and so detailed! Every incident was an erotic long journey in bed. This book was well written and should be kept in the back of your bookshelf just in case your kids might find it by accident

Incredible read and yes, Harris did know everyone. He was vain , boastful and ever ready to toot his own horn BUT he tells exactly what he thought. His descriptions of his amatory adventures are spot-on and nobody who has ever been with MORE than one woman would doubt a word(!).

Caution : you should read more than the juicy bits as you will glean information on the tenor of the times and how a guy from nowhere climbed the ladder of success in the cut-throat world of literature. His work on Shakespeare, which is good, cannot hold a candle to this splendid autobiography. Scoundrels always charm us and Frank was one of those delightful scoundrels that mesmerized the dinner table. Ever anxious to deflate the imperious, he illuminates the warts of the rich and snooty.

I'd require this in any course on 20th C manners and morals. Hypocrites need not apply!

The Kindle Literary Classics $3.99 edition of Frank Harris's MY LIFE AND LOVES is short and seriously incomplete, probably one volume out of the five original ones, which are on sale separately on Kindle. Don't buy it. I've informed Amazon.

The GrovePress version I have seen is over 1000 pages and includes all *five volumes* of My Life and Loves.

Okay, so we all agree Harris was a liar. Moving right along, it is an incredible piece of fiction, autobiography, and now history. I have heard his cowboy story quoted as fact by ethnic studies instructors, watched the plays of Wilde and pondered both of their distorted lives, wondered about his comments on the Churchill's, etc.

Harris, however pathological, is, for the first two or three books, a remarkable read. I doubt that many read every word, and now could never imagine reading ALL of it. However, if you want to understand something of 19th Century English literature and life, I think you need to read at least half. Just expect to be very weary of Frank Harris after a bit. As Wilde famously observed: "Frank Harris has been received in all the great houses - Once."

Ponder the change in lives if nothing else. This work was scandalous when it came out. In the age of internet porn it is now mostly a historical curiosity. In time it will dwindle to the point where it will disappear. Harris ended up in Hell, if it exists at all. Probably one of his tortures would be to watch memory of his existence fade. Whatever happened to Ralph Ginzburg anyway...