Customer Reviews

An Unseemly Man: My Life as a Pornographer, Pundit, and Social Outcast

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

 

 

After I searched the book store for over an hour, I finally found "An Unseemly Man". Once I started reading the book, I did not put it down until I was finished! I was a big fan of Larry's before I read the book....I was his #1 fan when I was done. I laughed out loud and shed a tear or two. You don't have to like what Larry does for a living...but don't make judgments til you read the book. You might see Larry in a whole different light. His story is truly amazing!

Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler and tons of other mags has finally written his memoirs. Titled An Unseemly Man it could just as easily been called A Bad Boy. The book is amusing and a quick read. He exposes his whole life to the reader, from his humble Kentucky beginnings to his luxurious life as a multimillionaire. He is not a great man and this is not a great book, but if have any interest in him pick it up. He has spent a lot of money and even spilled his blood protecting free speech. All this from a guy who just wanted to make a living giving people what they want

Interesting autobiography on Flynt's humble beginnings and later Hustler magazine exploits and his fight for 1st Amendment freedoms. To make the book more interesting there should have been more focus on his seedy past and less on the court trials. If you like John Grisham novels you might like this one as well.

i had bought this for my boyfriend, i let a friend borrow it after he was done with it and she loved it so much she bought it too!

What can possibly be said about Larry Flynt that has not been said already? The guy is a one-man attraction at the side show of Americana. Pornographer, First Amendment hero, political gadfly, and more. The country would be a tad different place, for both good and bad, without him.

AN UNSEEMLY MAN may not shed a lot of light on its subject, though, really, is that much of a surprise? After all, it is not that Larry doesn't have a dark side, but that he has already exposed it. Nonetheless, the book is worthwhile just to gasp in awe and disgust at that exposure. Like the sideshow attraction, we cannot look away at the public display of the previously unseen. It takes us from Larry's upbringing in Kentucky and his shudder-inducing first sexual experience all the way up to being top dog of his publishing empire. Along the way we get the legal battles, the paralyzing gunshot and all the other details that have made Larry a household name.

The book, not surprisingly, is not a difficult read. Anyone capable of grasping the nuances of Hustler magazine's articles and editorials should be able to get through it fast enough. AN UNSEEMLY MAN may not be the best book on your shelf, but you'll get a kick out of it.

Flynt is a drunk, drug addict, pornographer, eighth-grade dropout, convicted felon, and adulterer who has a lot to teach us. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. While many people would cringe at the thought of reading his book, I would remind you of the words of Jimmy Buffet who sang, "Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks, and I learned much from both of their styles."

Larry Flynt is one of Americas great unrecognized heroes. He stood for our constitution every chance he could and it cost him dearly. His story should be read by everyone who really wants to know the price of freedom in our country. My only problem with the book is it was too short skimping over things I would of liked greater detail on. Otherwise it was a good read and better than the movie The People V.s. Larry Flynt.

GREAT BOOK! You will love. If you enjoyed the movie. You will like the book even more!

Larry Flynt is one of America's most colorful adult- industry businessmen. Starting with his dysfunctional childhood, Flynt's life reads like a tragic novel with a fairly happy ending. He spent his youth doing very unchild-like things such as selling moonshine and copulating with a mother hen. He ran away from home a few times; was molested by a man; spent time in the army; divorced twice at a young age; and entered the world of adult business where his life became a revolving door of courtroom appearances and, ultimately, triumph over the system.

Controversy is something that has followed Larry Flynt around for most of his lifetime. Much of it, the combative Mr. Flynt brought on himself. He deliberately behaved in outrageous ways, just to challenge the rules and defy authority. His courtroom antics, in particular, went way over the top and shocked and amazed everyone, including those who felt they knew him pretty well. Flynt commitment such wild and crazy acts as wearing a U.S. flag as a diaper in the courtroom; spitting on a judge; cursing out loud; and throwing oranges when he got fed up with court procedures.

This book tries to cram too much, in my opinion, into too little space. In a matter of a couple of paragraphs, Flynt often covers a span of several years of his life. He elaborates and explains some of his life events in more detail. But other events are just mentioned briefly, in a few sentences, making you want to know a little more. I assume that Flynt did this to keep the book from getting so long that people would not want to read it. Given all of the twists and turns in Flynt's outrageous life, this book could have easily been two or even three times longer.

Many personal tragedies have befallen Larry Flynt throughout his lifetime. He witnessed the death of his younger sister, who was diagnosed with leukemia and died at the tender age of 5. He had two women betray him, shortly following his marriage to each one. He was shot by a white supremacist and was left paralyzed from the waist down. His third wife, Althea, died in the bathtub at home. He underwent a "born again" experience under the guiding hand of Ruth Stapleton (President Jimmy Carter's sister), and later rejected the experience completely. He finally had his shining moment when he won the Supreme Court decision over Jerry Falwell, but with so many negative events in one's lifetime, you have to wonder how the man kept his sanity.

Larry Flynt's life as told in this book would make an interesting psychological case study. What impact did the molestation by the hitchhike driver have on Flynt's psyche? What about the two betrayals by early girlfriends? Did they scar him for life against making emotional commitments to women? Was the fact that Althea came from an even more dysfunctional (believe it or not!) background just a coincidence, or do these types of individuals commonly fall for each other? None of these questions is easy to answer. Flynt's life has all the makings of a research study for a Ph.D. psychology student.

Most of the Larry Flynt saga includes information that I was already aware of, but hadn't heard in a long time. I already knew about the chicken incident, the poverty, the go- go clubs, the magazines, and all the court appearances in defense of free speech. I knew that he started in business right here in my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. But I had forgotten about Flynt's experience with the Delorean tapes (he got them from an anonymous source- they showed the FBI framing Mr. Delorean and then falsely arresting him on drug charges), so this was a refresher course on that subject. And I did not know anything about the experience with the hitchhiker or the dysfunctional life of his wife Althea. These were all new things for me to read about.

Flynt makes some interesting observations about life, the law, and sexual repression and his own personal stories keep you entertained as you read. Some of the statements he makes might seem a little outrageous and difficult to believe, but I see no reason for him to be making them up. The chicken incident, for example, seems a little too wild to be true. But the fact is, I have talked to people who grew up in Kentucky in the 1940's and 1950's and they can vouch for what Flynt is talking about. It wasn't uncommon at all, in the state of Kentucky during this era, for people to do "things" with animals. It was also ordinary for every family to have at least one alcoholic and it was fairly common for family members to practice inbreeding. These were all acceptable ways of life at this time, in the state of Kentucky.

Whether you like Larry Flynt or not, you have to admire his incredible tenacity and his relentless refusal to allow others to control his life and tell him how to live. Flynt has spent much of his life as a crusader for First Amendment rights, and he has sacrificed much of his personal time and freedom to fight for the right to be offensive. His autobiography is a true rags to riches story. From the sleepy hollows of Kentucky to a multi- million dollar business and a mansion in Beverly Hills, Larry Flynt has come a long way. He has fought for individual expression and paid a high price for pursuing his cause. He lost the woman of his dreams and almost lost his own life in the process.

"An Unseemly Man" reads like a work of fiction. Much of it will shock and surprise the average reader, while leaving others feeling a sense of disgust. There is a fair amount of profanity, and Flynt is very outspoken from beginning to end, explaining his point of view in a direct and sometimes abrasive way. It's an interesting book to read, to say the least, and it will make many people reassess the way they view one of the best- known and most controversial businessmen in the adult entertainment industry, Mr. Larry C. Flynt.

Is Larry Flynt a champion of free speech, exposer of hypocrisy among clay-footed moralists in elected office, and likable purveyor of dirty magazines, or is the man the gravest threat to community decency since the abolition of the chastity belt? You decide.

That Larry Flynt collaborated on an autobiography that wasn't a salacious commercial for sleaze shocked many who thought he man incapable of tact. When this volume showed up in public libraries, some thought pigs might have sprouted wings. But the fact is, this is mostly a straightforward life story whose subject happens to be in the skin trade. That I am about to write a review in which I say some nice things about Larry Flynt is little short of a betrayal of the ethics so many of our teachers in Catholic elementary school tried to instill in us in a city where Flynt's memory still loomed from his time as public enemy number one. Except for a few years away at college I have always lived around Cincinnati, Ohio, scene of the alarmingly bad idea that was the 1970's obscenity trial of pornographer Larry Flynt, then a resident of our uptight right-wing berg. As a youth in the decade after the trial, I heard names like "Larry Flynt" and "Hustler Magazine" occasionally spoken in hushed tones as if it were evil incarnate being mentioned (which naturally made me curious as to what this matter was all about). So when Flynt made his return to "Censornati" in the late '90's to re-open the first adult bookstore in town since he left in the aftermath of his ill-advised trial, it was major local news and I was bemusedly interested. I got the front page newspaper clippings sent to me and followed along as the moralists among Cincinnati residents and elected officials reacted with wild outrage to the return of this outcast Satan.

So, just for background sake, that's what I knew about Larry Flynt when I began this book, fresh from having seen the fairly good movie made of his life "The People Versus Larry Flynt". (Even if it did make my home town seem like it had no one living in it except hysterical, repressed, neo-fascist Puritans.)

I'll say this. Larry Flynt in this book is refreshingly unpretentious. He is who he is, an ambitious entrepreneur who earned every penny he ever spent and who is unafraid of taking a stand on the things he believes in. He is also a foul-mouthed, perverse, virulently anti-government, self-aggrandizing publicity hound, who made me laugh with and at him a time or two and left me thinking he is most likely basically harmless to public morals and in helping members of Congress stick to their wedding vows via his posted bounties on information about their infidelities, he might even do society some good.

But news flash to young liberal anti-censorship types who might read this. There are SURE more palatable First Amendment In Action heroes out there to idolize.