I, Goldstein

I haven't finished reading it yet. I just read a little at a time, but I met him a 3 or 4 times in the early 1980s when I lived in North Carolina, and even though someone else finished the book, everything I have read really sounds like the Al Goldstein I knew.

Among the most outrageous of our contemporary American outlaws, and among the funniest, is Al Goldstein, the co-founder and lightning rod for the infamous, gleefully tasteless semi-underground sex tabloid _Screw_, which he describes as "the most notorious, uproarious, and influential pornographic newspaper in the world". Through his publication (and through his cable television show "Midnight Blue") Goldstein chronicled any sort of sexual story, and maintained a forum for his famous editorials which were the prose equivalent of a raised middle finger to politicians, religious leaders, feminists, and to any lawyer, restaurateur, movie producer, or airline who happened to irritate him.

Regardless of what you think about Goldstein as a person, he was nothing if not a freedom fighter and this wonderfully-written work expertly captures the essence of what it is to be Goldstein. None reading this review, it can be assumed, have ever faced as many horrible twists of fate as Goldstein--Divorced five times, constant medical problems and the squander of his fortune--all the while being relentlessly pursued by the law enforcement machine.