Technology-enslaved, boring, all-American: this is pretty dispiriting stuff. Thank goodness Erica Jong is there to remind...
Is sex dead?
There may be the naughty bit or two here, but the collection is surprisingly—perhaps distressingly—chaste: This isn’t really “sex writing,” but “writing about sex,” a kissing cousin of dancing about architecture. Syndicated columnist Savage performs one unthinkable, or at least deeply unseemly, act: He includes a 40-page hunk of his Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2002) in violation of nearly every word in this book’s title. (It’s not great, though that isn’t to say the piece is without its merits; we can forgive anyone who writes, “I didn’t go to New York City simply to sin and to defy Osama bin Laden and his Islamo-fascist pals. I was also in New York because Jerry Falwell pisses me off.”) Elsewhere, two dozen writers and journalists, from stalwarts like Erica Jong to newcomers like Cole Kazdin, weigh in on the sociology of sex. Naomi Wolf sagely examines what pornography does to women, which seems less to dehumanize them than to make them uninteresting: “By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high ‘exchange value,’ as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale.” It does the same to men, too; Christopher O’Brien’s Wired article on would-be cyberporn king Gary Kremen is a masterwork of reportage on the evil of banality, while Alessandro Camon, writing in Salon.com, ponders the influence of imagination-stifling smut on the twisted puppies who committed the atrocities in Iraq’s most infamous prison: “The president and his inner circle said, ‘This is not the America that we know,’ ” Camon observes. “But it is. The pictures from Abu Ghraib are American ‘gonzo porn.’ They reek of frat-house hazing and gang initiation rituals.”
Technology-enslaved, boring, all-American: this is pretty dispiriting stuff. Thank goodness Erica Jong is there to remind readers, in closing, that “wild passionate sex exists.” Even without a credit card and a mouse.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-598-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.
Based on eight years of reporting and thousands of hours of interaction, a journalist chronicles the inner worlds of three women’s erotic desires.
In her dramatic debut about “what longing in America looks like,” Taddeo, who has contributed to Esquire, Elle, and other publications, follows the sex lives of three American women. On the surface, each woman’s story could be a soap opera. There’s Maggie, a teenager engaged in a secret relationship with her high school teacher; Lina, a housewife consumed by a torrid affair with an old flame; and Sloane, a wealthy restaurateur encouraged by her husband to sleep with other people while he watches. Instead of sensationalizing, the author illuminates Maggie’s, Lina’s, and Sloane’s erotic experiences in the context of their human complexities and personal histories, revealing deeper wounds and emotional yearnings. Lina’s infidelity was driven by a decade of her husband’s romantic and sexual refusal despite marriage counseling and Lina's pleading. Sloane’s Fifty Shades of Grey–like lifestyle seems far less exotic when readers learn that she has felt pressured to perform for her husband's pleasure. Taddeo’s coverage is at its most nuanced when she chronicles Maggie’s decision to go to the authorities a few years after her traumatic tryst. Recounting the subsequent trial against Maggie’s abuser, the author honors the triumph of Maggie’s courageous vulnerability as well as the devastating ramifications of her community’s disbelief. Unfortunately, this book on “female desire” conspicuously omits any meaningful discussion of social identities beyond gender and class; only in the epilogue does Taddeo mention race and its impacts on women's experiences with sex and longing. Such oversight brings a palpable white gaze to the narrative. Compounded by the author’s occasionally lackluster prose, the book’s flaws compete with its meaningful contribution to #MeToo–era reporting.
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4229-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not an easy read but an essential one.
Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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