Manny

Make It SO Real - Make Us Feel

Revisado: 01-02-25

Okay, so this isn’t a completely objective review. I have precious, but troubled, 27-year-old daughter whose birth was very similar to that of your precious daughter, so my eyes are still moist from your ending

Also like you, I’m a writer - but a rock songwriter and memoir author: Tracks In Sands of Time. (I mention it not to promote, but rather to remind myself that I actually DID it!)

Yet another similarity: we are comrades in overthinking and obsessing.

All I can say is PLEASE KEEP IT UP! You’re WONDERFUL.

Oh, one difference between us with very little distinction: I’m male.

Thank you, thank you thank you!

Manny Freiser

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Unafraid to Look In The Mirror

Revisado: 09-08-24

Dear Leslie

I’m in ‘artistic love’ with your writing and the person it explores. Yours is a marvelously complex mind, in the person a wonderfully gifted writer.

I’m becoming (even more) annoying as I attempt to break into what others are doing in order to read them magical lines from this book.

I just downloaded all your other books and can’t wait to get into them!

THANKS!

Manny Freiser

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My Emotional ‘Soundtrack’

Revisado: 02-29-24

I, like so many others, love Ann’s writing (and feel I know her on a first-name basis): a deep soul, evident realness, kindness and wisdom pervades her work.

Her writing helps me experience more deeply and fully emotions, feelings - life itself. Her writing is like a magic formula - or multiplier - that permits me to live a ‘larger,’ deeper inner life; to turn my ‘black and white’ life into cinematic color, deepening my experience of memories, love, and even the mundane. This is the closest I’ll come to my lifelong fantasy of having a dramatic, beautiful soundtrack follow me as I move through life. Everything seems bigger, more heartfelt - more important.

I’m still trying to recover from Tom Lake which paralleled with some deep, basic emotional areas of my own life - and I don’t think I’ll ever forget Suki.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’m also a recovering rock songwriter and recent amateur memoir writer (it’s all about me and love), and your works are the most wonderful ‘schoolroom’ in which to try to learn the immense amount of empathy and caring and intimacy with words necessary to write anything long than a three-minute rock song.

Thank you thank you!
Manny Freiser

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Colin’s Got Me Seeing Scarlett

Revisado: 09-12-23

I really got a kick out of your book - very funny - that is, until I realized you married Scarlett Johanssen. Now I simultaneously worship at your feet and abwhore you for getting the most sexy, beautiful classywoman in the known universe. That one star beats out ANY of the stars I give your book. Why even WRITE a book?!! I'd never leave the house. I, on the other hand, have enlarged a couple pictures of the two of you, cropped you out of them, and am working on my pickup lines hoping to charm the picture of Scar (my cool nickname for her) into dating me. Even though she still won't look me in the eye, I am determined to have my way with her - um - photo. Eat your heart out! - mf P.S. please also consider this my audition for SNL.

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Classic Book - Classic Performance

Revisado: 09-10-23

I have never encountere such a perfect
marriage between Material and Performance. Meryl Streep’s hear-tuggingly nostalgic and romantic (both in the fact and feel) reading of this wonderful story had me in an emotional state from beginning to end. Young love, missing the past, treasring what you've got, uncertainty and twists and turns of the future - hot feelings - this book has it all. Ms Streep almost alchemically combines all of its elements and emotions into a magically superb performance. I've started on my second reading of this amazing book…

MF

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A Hole In One

Revisado: 02-10-23

I’ve gone through a relatively long life, almost completely, unaware of the entire world of meaning, residing within the human butt. I was under the misconception, probably common to vapid young males, that almost everything about it could be explained in sexual terms. Heather Radke has found more to discuss on the topic than i heretofore imagined - and has done it thoroughly, literately and really interestingly. I confess to buying this book out of curiosity as to how it could contain more than ten pages, but came away in awe of how much there is to know about the common butt. I can hardly wait for Volume Two! The narration by Radke and the book itself are top flight and highly recommended. Why ‘a hole in one’ as the title of this review? I just wanted to crack a tasteless ‘butt’ joke - and now feel the literary - and other - freedom to do so! - Manny Freiser

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There But For The Lack of Networking

Revisado: 01-17-23

This book was a fascinating (re-)education - moving, inspiring, nostalgic - and melancholic. I’d known Ron Brownstein as an excellent reporter. Now I can also report that he’s an excellent author.

I’m sure some of my reaction was, at least in part, about who and where I was at the time. Having met in my 60’s band, The Grodes, my girlfriend and I (we were the band’s lead singers), moved to LA together near the end of 1968 to ‘make it’ in the music business. We pledged our love as well as writing and performing talents to each other ‘til the end of time’ (in our case, that was March 1, 1985). Daily we filled my car with cheap (17 cents/gallon) gas and drove around Hollywood ogling at the Hollywood mansions, one of which we’d soon own. Patti was immediately signed to Liberty Records and, at 17, touted as the next big thing. I was relegated to a publishing contract. It hadn’t taken ‘them’ long to break us up as a duo. We married in August 1970. We ‘re-united’ in 1972 as Fire & Rain to release our eponymously-named album on Mercury Records. On a $12,000 budget (of which $4,000 was kicked back to our producer), we scored a Top 100 single, Hello Stranger. There followed four grinding years of nothingness except performing in little cabarets like The Bla Bla Cafe and restaurants like The Hungry Tiger - oh, and being jealous of all the success rising all around our North Hollywood apartment like smoke on the water: The Eagles and Joni in Laurel, Fleetwood Mac in The Valley - etc etc etc. we released the lushly flat album (thanks to legendary arranger Arty Butler) Living Together on legendary exec Russ Regan’s label, 20th Century Records (‘legends’ were everywhere except having our backs). The resulting album was so boring even WE wouldn’t listen to it. The record failed as did our marriage.

We experienced the precise mirror opposite careers of the monster ‘70s artists covered in the book. Still it was magical, seductive, addictive, and ultimately disillusioning time.

Point being, minus the success, we were here in the middle of it when it all happened (I even helped David Crosby finish a song at a local deli and went to school with Linda Ronstadt) and can vouch not only for the factual accuracy of Brownstein’s tale, but even more importantly, for its flavor. I thought it would be a typically average ‘survey’ effort, but instead it was captivating and compelling. It t transported me back to that time, when folk rock music, hope and inspiration were in the very Hollywood air we breathed.

Patti and I ‘coulda been somebody,’ if we’d only spent more evenings networking and less time cocooning. I still think we got the best end of the deal.

It was a great time - and this is a great book!

Manny Freiser

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A Rhinoceros With Gas

Revisado: 11-11-22

You’re in the room with the President of The United States - for TEN HOURS. This time spent with Donald Trump was as compelling as standing directly behind a rhinoceros with gas!

I had been thinking about how delicate our democracy is, but I was wrong. That Trump sat in the Oval ONE DAY, let alone four years, is truly testament to the strength of this democracy. It was horrible - existentially dangerous. I’m so relieved it’s over - or IS it?! This country had BETTER come together for no other reason as important as blocking his re-entrance to office, whether president or dog catcher. GET OUT FROM BEHIND THAT RHINOCEROUS!!

If he hadn’t commandeered the levers of our government, I’d sympathetically recommend immediate residential treatment for his several mental and emotional issues.

Thanks, Bob, for putting a vastly informative finger down my throat. Write a romantic comedy or instruction manual next. We could use a little relaxation - even boredom. No one will have a peaceful moment reading The Trump Tapes.

And Bob, you’d better have your ears checked after that verbal assault.

-m

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Seeking High-Strung Perfectionist With Tentacles

Revisado: 06-23-22

Dear Heather - I fell in love with your book because I fell in love with you. Your writing made you feel at once familiar and mysterious, super bright and definitely trouble, ill-tempered and hot. I hate to ruin the brilliant conclusion of your brilliant tome - and it really IS - but forget about Bill and run away with me. Just trust me: you won’t care that I’m a generation older or on crutches because we share the same sense of humor, sense of longing, itch for sexiness, itch from claustrophobia - and just desire for desire simply for desire’s sake. On the other hand, maybe we’d best enjoy each other from a safe distance - at least, that’s my wife’s opinion. Just know that Foreverland will always be one of my favorite books and that you will be on my mind, forcing quotes out of my face almost on a daily basis because you really got love, life and relationships right - for me anyway, because we’re soulmates. I’m almost sure of it. But if we’re not, can we fool around anyway?! -Love, A Real Fan

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With His Reality, Who Needs Science Fiction?!

Revisado: 03-06-22

I wish that I had been able to understand more of it, but that never once kept me from being utterly hypnotized - fascinated - by this superhuman mind, his thoughts and ideas.

His ideas have impacted so many aspects of our lives - and it seems that we are just in the early stages of relevance of his advanced thinking to society on earth - and beyond…

Manny Freiser

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