Harris goes where few men have gone before in this graphic, candid tell-all.
Journalist Harris (The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, 1997) dons the drag, turning the hermetic Daniel—bookish, reserved, aging—into the cyber-whore Denial.
Talk about taking your midlife crisis seriously. Harris is not a transvestite or a cross-dresser, just “a shameless opportunist indulging in a fantasy rampant among gay men”: that straight men are sexier than gay men—more robust, more macho—and that they make ideal mates. “When one is taught from birth that gay men are morally reprehensible, diseased pariahs, child molesters, one may not want to select one’s Prince Charming from abominations of the same ilk,” he explains. Vanity is another motive. Harris realizes that he has lost his physical allure; he’s in his 40s, balding. As Denial, he has a stab at a sexual renaissance. With the help of the Internet, his method for meeting men, he’ll get all the sex he wants (and then some); along the way he’ll meet misguided nice guys, psychopaths and losers. The sexual act itself, incidentally, is “as unimportant to [him] as taking a shower.” The best material comes when this “high Solomonic priestess of the pillow” listens closely and dispenses advice to the lonely souls who have made it to his bed. He recalls one john who feels so good after their encounter that the man promises to propose to his girlfriend as soon as he gets home that night. (Harris is happy to have helped.) Throughout, he gains insights regarding sex and class (the poor are more likely to tell him gallant lies, for instance); feels the sting of being in the closet (all of cyberspace feels like a closet); and learns a lot about himself (being a woman brought out the man in him).
Harris goes where few men have gone before in this graphic, candid tell-all.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1516-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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