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For more information on how to obtain your copy please contact: Jatair Florton Star Publishing Company Tel: 1758 450 7827 Email: jatair.f@stluciastar.com. Also available on Amazon. www.rickwayneuniverse.com

Book Review

If you happen to be someone who knows Arnold Schwarzenegger personally or heard of him before he married into the Kennedy clan and became governor of California, chances are you’ve also heard of Rick Wayne. Both gentlemen were once famous throughout Europe and the US as winners of the Mr. Universe and other coveted bodybuilding titles. In Wayne’s case, he was also a recording artiste in England, a member of the legendary independent record producer Joe Meek’s stable when Cliff Richard was starting out on his way to a knighthood. Wayne cut several records that were released by Pye Records and Meek’s own company Triumph, at the same time starring in his own once-a week Radio Luxembourg programme. He was also a regular contributor to the British fitness magazine Health & Strength, then edited by Oscar Heidenstam, in the process gaining for himself a reputation as the bad boy of British bodybuilding, thanks to his less than reverent stories about the bodybuilding life. He was among the first to publicly acknowledge the use of anabolic steroids by European bodybuilders!

Rick Wayne later moved first to New York, then to Southern California, as did his friend Arnold around the same time, Wayne to become editor of Joe Weider’s bodybuilding magazine Muscle Builder and later Flex. He also found time to write Muscle Wars, published by St. Martin’s Press. The book, which earned him the sobriquet “the Rex Reed of bodybuilding,” is still available on EBay at five times its original price tag.

In the late Eighties, Rick Wayne returned to his native Saint. Lucia, accompanied by his Ms. USA girlfriend Mae Mollica. Together they operate one of the Caribbean’s leading publishing houses, a successful commercial printing company and two newspapers.  Wayne is the host of his island’s most controversial TV show, called TALK, generally hated by local politicians. He is also editor in chief of the STAR, arguably the Caribbean’s most discussed newspaper, as much for Wayne’s exposés as for his behind-the-scenes coverage of political events. And now he has authored his third book on Caribbean politics (the previous two are It’ll be Alright in the Morning and Foolish Virgins), entitled Lapses & Infelicities—not surprisingly, already making waves throughout the region.
An insider’s account of politics in the sun, Lapses & Infelicities exposes all that is rotten in the politics of the Caribbean, even though the book concentrates mainly on the political life of Saint Lucia. No one is spared, from the recently deceased Sir John Compton to the former prime minister Kenny Anthony to the present Stephenson King administration. Along the way the author exposes to the naked eye, the hidden truths behind the expensive farces that periodically pass for commissions of inquiry, in themselves, absolutely corrupt. Written in the racy style for which Rick Wayne was famous when he worked as a journalist at Weider Publications in California, Lapses & Infelicities represents red-blooded history, some of it quite sad, all of it exciting to read. Here will be found detailed accounts of a septuagenarian prime minister’s hot affair with a 15-year-old schoolgirl, including his love letters wherein he seeks to impress her with Shakespearean sonnets, often misquoted. Here, too, is a gripping account of a vengeful government’s attempt to frame the journalist-author as a child pornographer—to the extent that the day’s prime minister convened a special meeting of parliament to deliver his privileged prevarications.

Small wonder that already reviewers are calling Lapses & Infelicities a bombshell that will serve generations of Saint Lucians as a reliable information source, in particular students of Caribbean history and political science.