cover image Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon

Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon

Cap Lesesne, . . Gotham, $26 (271pp) ISBN 978-1-59240-170-3

You needn't be contemplating cosmetic surgery to be entertained by Lesesne's blend of name-dropping, horn-tooting, medical advice and insights. After more than 20 years of operating mostly on the rich and famous, he has plenty of stories. Among his more memorable patients are a gay man who wants breast implants on his back to give his partner something to hold onto during sex and the straight man who brought in his wife one day and his girlfriend the next. Lesesne also writes of receiving death threats from a Venezuelan oil magnate whose penis turned black after waist and hip liposuction (he failed to follow the doctor's post-op orders). Those details, along with gossip (including Lesesne's short-lived romance with Katie Couric), provide the juiciest bits of what sometimes reads more like an infomercial than a memoir. A recollection about a Frenchwoman morphs into a plug for the author's skin-care line; an anecdote about a woman who asks him out while on the operating table leads to a plug for a "light anesthesia cocktail" he and his anesthesiologist developed. You don't reach the pinnacle of plastic surgery success by downplaying your strengths, but Lesesne's book would have been even more appealing if he had performed a little ego-reduction surgery. (Oct.)