Bøker av Arthur Vanderbilt

Every once in a while, certainly not often, a god or goddess descends to earth and walks among us, a young person whose looks are so striking that they seem of another world, and who, for a brief moment, have no idea of the power of their looks over others.Jack is just such a god, strayed from Olympus, a 24-year-old who is hired as a Personal Trainer at a suburban gym. Often such gods have other powers beyond their looks. Jack's are an effortless strength and fitness and energy. If the best Personal Trainers at the gym struggle to execute 10 perfect pull ups, Jack performs 30 flawless ones and still looks like he could keep going, addressing every routine in the gym with a grace and style that keeps all eyes on him.Every member of the gym wants to hire Jack as their Personal Trainer. Two of his obsessed clients want to possess this god-like creature. Anne is ready to leave the fantasy world her hedge fund manager husband has created for her and their two teenage children, leave all to run away with her Personal Trainer. And Latham, a prominent tax attorney, thinks nothing of blowing off meetings with important clients to sit rink side with Jack at hockey games. Under Jack's spell, their lives revolve around him.And Jack's life, too, is turned upside down as he enters a strange new world of mansions and country clubs of summer homes and shopping sprees. JACK'D takes the reader into the curious world of today's gyms: where the regulars come daily to lift and press and pump and push, pulling and crunching and planking and squatting, lunging and curling and running and climbing, pedaling and jumping, all to look more like the genetically endowed Personal Trainers; where the true believers flock to their Neverland to keep from growing old, there to man the Maginot line against Eternity.

"Denny, long before he surfaced in my cove, was a legend well-known to me, a myth entitled: Best-Kept Boy in the World."-Truman CapoteDenham (Denny) Fouts, the twentieth century's most famous male prostitute, was a socialite and literary muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. But in short order he befriended (and bedded) the rich and celebrated and in the process conquered the world.No less an august figure than the young Gore Vidal was enchanted by Denny's special charms. He twice modeled characters on Denny in his fiction, saying it was a pity that Denny never wrote a memoir. To Vidal he was "un homme fatal." Truman Capote, who devoted a third of Answered Prayers to Denny's life story, found that "to watch him walk into a room was an experience. He was beyond being good-looking; he was the single most charming-looking person I've ever seen." Writer Christopher Isherwood was more to the point: he called Denny "the most expensive male prostitute in the world."In his short life, Denny achieved a mythic status, and Best-Kept Boy in the World for the first time follows him into his rarefied world of barons and shipping tycoons, lords, princes, heirs of great fortunes, artists, and authors. Here is the story of an American original, a story with an amazing cast of unforgettable characters and extraordinary settings, the book Gore Vidal wished Denny had written.Arthur Vanderbilt is the author of many books of history, biography, memoirs, and essays. He lives in New Jersey and Massachusetts.