Rating: 
Summary: a shallow man in a shallow trade
Review: Having been in many of the situations that Rick Whitaker has been in, I can honestly say that I'm disappointed. This memoir is so shallow after all that is said and done. The person that told him to make it light, was not doing him a favor. I'm sure he has more talent! The only interesting character in this book is a guy named Francisco, who actually likes the men he sleeps with. Even the "nasty" ones. A book about Francisco's hustling experiences would be more compelling in my view. Rick's character is as aimless as his writing. By the end of his story, you feel little for him. And you imagine that he'll be drugging and cruising sometime in the near future. Well, maybe the fact that he's ageing and balding will put the brakes on that notion! This memoir makes him look like a used up complainer with no depth of soul. But his encounters are true to life. I'll give him that. Hey, Rick, if you ever read this, send me an email. We both have father issues!
Rating: 
Summary: Exactly a memoir of what he thinks
Review: I bought the book...becasue someone had suggested it to me. I am not a big reader but i saw it was a short book so i read it. It is overwhelming how ones life can truely take the idea of hustling and turn it all areound into an emotionally difficult life. Whitaker has taken the simple idea of hustling and told us why we do the things we do in our life...(not necessarily hustling) when i read the book i was bound by all the amazing ideas and emotions that he has gone through his head. It is not easily understood by many why we do these things...addiction is stong but your emotions are stronger and that is how Whitaker feels it to be.
Rating:
Summary: Luminous Minimalism
Review: I had a roommate who was a call boy. He would come home high on cocaine, rambling incoherently about this "celeb" and that celeb who had paid him for his services. My roommate never made much sense, but his ramblings were always interesting in a pathological sort of way. Rick Whitaker's experience with the profession is vastly more coherent, but I'm not sure if it is more interesting. Nonetheless, he is a remarkably talented writer, and I look forward to hearing more from this surprisingly sensitive and intellegent young man. Most importantly, he breaks stereotypes with this book, and he broke my heart with his honesty. I think I fell in love while reading this....
Rating: 
Summary: A pleasant surprise
Review: I picked this book up for cheap thrills and was surprised to discover a writer of directness, intelligence, honesty, and good sense. This may be the "How Proust Can Change Your Life" of gay male hustling--Whitaker explicates a familiar subject and uncovers pertinent and rather profound principles of life. His experiences in the sex trade comprise a sort of "pilgrim's progress"--the tao of prostitution--and, yes, some of the experiences are quite sexy, too. At one point I worried that the book was leading up to an obligatory denunciation of everything-that's-destroying-the-very-fabric-of-America, but I need not have concerned myself. Whitaker is above the just-say-no crap. The book is nonjudgmental, intuitively grasping the needs and desires that lead one to certain choices in life. There are plenty of ways to prostitute oneself in life, and plenty of soul-devouring addictions--not all of them illegal or even disreputable, but all comparable in their impact on the human spirit. Without fanfare, the book imparts its moral lessons to readers who have a mind open to them, a mind unconvinced that virtuous living entails making no mistakes or building hedges against experience. For me, the book was a neat surprise. The writer actually has something to say, and he says it with modesty and wisdom.
Rating:
Summary: An almost perfect book
Review: I picked this up whilst doing some research for a film I am making on Rent Boys and expected a depressing and salacious read. What I got instead was a gentle, insightful book that was at times poetic, and always a pleasure to read. As a gay man with some experience on the scene, I though the author described perfectly the impulses and emotions that lead you into behaviour that could be labelled sex addiction. Whenever faced with the plethora or remarkable sights and experiences that can just seem to drift passed you as a gay man I have always uttered the response "Life is Complex". Well I think this book fully describes the complexity. In a way it reminded me of "Bright Lights Big City"....but whereas I found that book rather sad in its litany of excess, this has a wistful, laid back quality that always seems positive even when describing the negative. This is one of those rare books...like the Tales of the City series, that I think I will find myself reading again and again.
Rating: 
Summary: Sad, Distrubing, Pretentious, Yet Worth Reading
Review: I read this book because I wanted to understand what it "felt like" to be a hustler. I was also interested in knowing how the author felt about his clients. I wanted to hear about first hand experiences and his overall impression of hustling. I guess the voyeur in me can't help but want to read someone else's journal entries. What an intimate way of peeking into someone's life. I got all of these things from reading Rick Whitaker's book. Anyone who has struggled with drug or alcohol abuse will be able to identify with much of this book. I found the family details and childhood memories particularly telling in how they alter self-esteem, motivation and life decisions. I also liked hearing about the specific encounters, which were detailed enough to let the reader share the experiences, without glamourizing them. What interested me at the end of the book was the lack of detail about the author's sobriety and how this may have impacted his decision to stop hustling. I guess that topic is another book in itself and I have to give him credit for so much honesty in his first year of sobriety.
Rating:
Summary: Sad, Distrubing, Pretentious, Yet Worth Reading
Review: It's a shame Rick Whitaker didn't take longer to write this book, which was published only a year after he stopped hustling. Some of the insights, and the prose, indicate he could have shed real light on a difficult, provocative subject. As it is, the book seems hurried (journal entries, which should have been reworked and woven into the narrative, are thrown in helter skelter), pretentious (Whitaker keeps quoting other, greater writers, whose stature he clearly aspires to...don't quote, write it yourself!) and, yet, in the end, it does have genuine power and weight. The author has had a tough life (an unloving father, a flighty mother, drug addictions) and is mature enough not to ask for pity. His insights into his own alienation and addiction are on the money. What may have tripped him up is his haste to come become a big time author. He admits that he couldn't get his novel published, and this book seems like his hasty answer to trying to launch a career. Since lots of people are jealous of people who can get published or paid for having sex (read some of the reviews below), he left himself open to getting slammed for opportunism. He deserves to be slapped on the wrist, but also encouraged. Despite its flaws, this is a sad, disturbing book that looks at some parts of the human heart most of us shy away from. Whitaker should maybe forget about trying to become a star, take a job of some sort (his idolatry of outlaws seems foolish at his age) and work on his writing. Perhaps the next book, with more time spent on the prose and insights, will be the one he is clearly capable of producing. Finally, this is reccommended for anyone who thinks male hustling is "glamorous." It comes across about as glamorous as working in a slaughterhouse, only with slightly better pay.
Rating:
Summary: A bit insincere
Review: Normally writers try to evoke certain feelings through their writings. I was left wondering, at the end of the book, what feelings Mr. Whitaker was actually trying to evoke. Pity, sympathy, understanding, forgiveness...? Franky, I felt none of that for him. I did feel, however, a bit of disgust. I am not going to assume the position of a moralist and so I won't judge what the author did. Aside from this, the book itself is not what I would call "quality prose". At times, it reads like a pompous college paper. I found particularly annoying Whitaker's propensity for throwing in quotes from famous figures and for using fancy words (e.g. mendacity, censorious, ennui, modus operandi, etc.) It seemed to me that he was trying to sort of compensate for his "dirty" past by showing off his intellectual side, which he indomitably possesses. What I also found annoying was the fact that the book lacked a clear well-crafted structure. Basically, we have an alternation of quasi-erotic storis with ramblings, masquerading as honest self-revelations, on the author's struggle with his own feelings. To that, you can also add a bunch of diary entries that serve as mere "filler". Frankly, this book is just another cheap commercial trick. On one hand, it aims at pandering to people's desire for quick trills. On the other hand, it aims at achieving the required, in the publishing world, dose of sentimentality taken for honesty. I think that the book would have had a different, more "acceptable" effect had the author reveled the TRUE extent of his hustling, with its nature, as ugly and unpalatable as it mihgt be, being unspared. He doesn't really do so. Either the publisher did not desire too much inappropriate information to come out or the author himself saved it so that it wouldn't completely (it already does to some degree) jar with, or obscure, his cultivated interests (classical music, philosophy, and literature). Though some people find the book "disarmingly frank", I find it a bit insincere at certain points. Towards the end of it, the author says that he has become "less promiscious" than he was before. That, I guess, implies that there was still some promiscuity going on around the time the book was released. So did Rick Whitaker completely change? The author wants us to think he did that. Do I think he did that? I don't know. I also still don't know why he really went into hustling. To make money or to spite his former boyfriend, Tom (we never found out why Tom left him)? Or perhaps Rick Whitaker was just a narcissistic self-indulgent gay man who craved attention and compliments. If that is so, then the whole book would have a different spin. Sex would be no longer a way for the author to satisfy his "needs" but rather a way for him to feed his ego. This is my take on the book. (...)
Rating:
Summary: THIS IS AN UNUSUAL ITEM
Review: okay--though not an expert in porn, I think you will be
disappointed by this if that is what you expect. I picked
up the book because of the reference to Wittgenstein on the
back cover, which I cannot resist. I believe Whitaker helped me
understand something Wittgenstein wrote in his war notebooks that I never understood before. Whitaker talks about how hard it is to describe feelings, that it is easier to show them or see them expressed by someone's actions (which Wittgenstein would agree with.) Ironically enough, Whitaker succeeds in conveying
how claustrophobic he felt during his years as a "hustler". This is a surprisingly affecting memoir that [pulls] you in almost from the beginning.
Rating:
Summary: Wow. Sex and philiosophy, and a great story
Review: This memoir is amazingly well written and honest. It's about the author's own experiences with sex for money, his drug addiction, and also his life growing up in a crazy family, and living in New York City in the 90s. It's sexy, intelligent, and moving. I highly recommend it, not only for gay men, but for everybody (over the age of 16 or so!). I hope Rick Whitaker writes many more books--and I hope I meet him sometime. (He's very cute, from the pictures of him on the book jacket.)
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