Rating: 
Summary: overly pretentious writing
Review: Certainly the subject material is interesting. It's the writer's style that is lacking. It's like she is writing a thesis for university and has to increase the size of the paper and so she writes on and on. It's overly scholarly and analytical when the reader just wants the story/history of these courtesans. As others have said, I mostly skim-read it, skimming over the paragraphs to try to pull out the tidbits of interest.
Rating:
Summary: overly pretentious writing
Review: Certainly the subject material is interesting. It's the writer's style that is lacking. It's like she is writing a thesis for university and has to increase the size of the paper and so she writes on and on. It's overly scholarly and analytical when the reader just wants the story/history of these courtesans. As others have said, I mostly skim-read it, skimming over the paragraphs to try to pull out the tidbits of interest.
Rating: 
Summary: Great subject, sloppy writing
Review: Disorganized vapid prose and loads of wishful "thinking" - it's a gender feminist cream dream. Better you should read Proust for artistic insight on the topic, and look for a better written and more factual history.
Rating:
Summary: Great subject, sloppy writing
Review: Disorganized vapid prose and loads of wishful "thinking" - it's a gender feminist cream dream. Better you should read Proust for artistic insight on the topic, and look for a better written and more factual history.
Rating:
Summary: Great subject, sloppy writing
Review: Disorganized vapid prose and loads of wishful "thinking" - it's a gender feminist cream dream. Better you should read Proust for artistic insight on the topic, and look for a better written and more factual history.
Rating: 
Summary: The same old story....
Review: I didn't make it all the way through this book. By halfway through, I was tired of the same plot being rehashed with different names. Young girl who has something bad happen to her so that she will never be able to be married, enters the theatre world, is discovered by someone who wants to keep her...he can't offer enough money so she moves up to someone even richer...somewhere along the line she gets the title "courtesan." But not everyone is a courtesan--there are actual requirements. This book is good, don't get me wrong, but it seemed like I was reading the same story over and over, and sometimes, the author told the SAME story over and over. The writing, although not scholarly, per se, is readable. As another reviewer stated, I would have like footnotes, or end of chapter notes to let me know where she got her information. Also, the book was put together well, except I didn't really understand the point of the "erotic stations" that seemed to be at the end of every chapter. What were their purpose? I would recommend this book if you just want an overview of the life of a courtesan. It is well written.
Rating:
Summary: The same old story....
Review: I didn't make it all the way through this book. By halfway through, I was tired of the same plot being rehashed with different names. Young girl who has something bad happen to her so that she will never be able to be married, enters the theatre world, is discovered by someone who wants to keep her...he can't offer enough money so she moves up to someone even richer...somewhere along the line she gets the title "courtesan." But not everyone is a courtesan--there are actual requirements. This book is good, don't get me wrong, but it seemed like I was reading the same story over and over, and sometimes, the author told the SAME story over and over. The writing, although not scholarly, per se, is readable. As another reviewer stated, I would have like footnotes, or end of chapter notes to let me know where she got her information. Also, the book was put together well, except I didn't really understand the point of the "erotic stations" that seemed to be at the end of every chapter. What were their purpose? I would recommend this book if you just want an overview of the life of a courtesan. It is well written.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting subject buried by flowery language...
Review: I had high expectations for this book and was looking forward to learning about an interesting and colorful group of women. Too bad I ended up skimming half of the book in my attempts to dig out information and facts out of a cloying sea of overly perfumed language. One of the rare instances where I think a man may have done a better job writing about women. The horror!
Rating:
Summary: More Saltpeter than Seduction
Review: I wanted to love this book, due to its fascinating subject matter and highly lauded author. However, I found myself continuously irritated with it, for a number of reasons: 1. The author has a talent for stating the obvious, ad nauseum. 2. The scholarship seems sloppy. Griffin makes much of a Courbet painting that includes a courtesan wearing a Kashmir shawl, placing a feminist significance upon the shawl as an object "made in a a far-off country by women for very little money." If the author had done her homework, she would have discovered that 19th-century Kashmir shawls were made by men (for very little money.) In another chapter, the author tells of a man supposedly named "Alfred Sert," the husband of the 19th-century art patron Misia Sert, who divorced her to marry a courtesan. However, the dastardly cad in question was actually Misia's second husband, Alfred Edwards. (Her third husband was the artist José Maria Sert.) These are just a couple of facts that I happen to know about, which causes me to speculate about what other errors might be lurking in the text. 3. The avoidance of grammatical sentence structure is annoying rather than artistic. There are at least two sentences on every page that start with the word "But." (In one place the author begins two sentences in a row with that word.) The text is also littered profusely with sentence fragments. A skilled writer can use such devices judiciously to good effect , but it makes for choppy reading when they are employed on every single blasted page. Alas, I wanted to be beguiled and seduced by the courtesans, but instead, my ardor was dampened by the foibles of their champion.
Rating: 
Summary: good, not great
Review: Seemingly a spinoff from Griffin's brilliant, multi-faceted "What Her Body Thought" which explored, among many things, the author's spiritual relationship to Marie Duplessis ("Camille"), this book, while filled with fun and fascinating facts, lacks the depth, provocative power and mutilvalency of many of Griffin's previous works. Still it is a revealing glimpse into the largely unseen world of French female power dynamics.
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