A unique, voyeuristic expose of a taboo bedroom counterculture.
Los Angeles screenwriter Stern penetrates the unconventional world of swinging.
Aiming to educate readers on an exclusive community he’s made a large part of his own life, Stern starts at the beginning, where, as a youth, his carnal education was awkwardly stunted by anxiety and hair-trigger orgasms. In desperate need of “sexual batting practice,” he embarked on a mission to shed his naïveté (and abandon monogamy altogether) through hookup websites, the Craigslist “crapshoot” and an immense amount of social networking with swinging couples looking for spicy interactions. The bounty of his titillating exploratory research into “the Lifestyle” forms the foundation of the book’s 13 lessons/chapters featuring explicitly graphic, casual sexual encounters and erotic arrangements. These include Stern’s first (disastrous) group-sex experience, which ended with a ceiling fan hitting him in the forehead. Most of these threesome sexcapades are carefully predetermined and, to Stern, gloriously NSA (no strings attached), which are just a few of the many benefits the author touts about this highly promiscuous subculture. Stern’s prose is appropriately authoritative and spares no carnal detail; he wants the reader to reap the benefits of his years of experience. For the curious, the author includes sections on varying scenarios like the hard versus soft swapping of partners and a thoughtful list of must-have items for the neophyte. Elsewhere, he explains the types of couples most encountered and the social etiquette required at play parties. With revealing material similar to Suzy Spencer’s Secret Sex Lives (2012), Stern still rejects the notion that his book technically violates the swinging community’s strict “code of discretion,” and he further implores readers to get out and explore the multifaceted pleasures of an alternative lifestyle tailored to “the right people with the right reasons with the right attitude.”
A unique, voyeuristic expose of a taboo bedroom counterculture.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3253-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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.
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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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