The literary equivalent of frozen yogurt—neither rich nor healthy, and not particularly filling.
Chronicle of a stay-at-home mom's failed marriage and salacious experiments with online dating.
First-time Canadian author Moore garnered attention for her personal blog IAmDivorcedNotDead.com, which led to this book on the same subject. In her frank, conversational voice, the author reveals the intimate details she shared with her husband, Robert, whose infidelity she partly blames on her losing interest in sex with him. After years of feeling numb, Moore felt a strong attraction to her married acupuncturist, with whom she undertook a yearlong affair. In the middle of his divorce, Moore separated from Robert, only to discover that her acupuncturist had been cheating on her and would, within weeks, be the father of his other mistress' new baby. Moore, along with two girlfriends whose marriages were on the rocks, threw herself into online dating and casual encounters. Her ensuing adventures included a visit to a swingers' club, explicit e-mail exchanges with, among others, a man who demands that she reports all of her sexual escapades (she consents), and many experiments with dominant lovers. She did not enter a committed relationship with any of them, choosing instead to bask in her newfound sexual liberation. The title, however, isn't technically true, since Moore is upfront about her conquests and pleasurable exploits, as well as, for the bulk of the book's action, still legally married. Her extreme honesty is engaging, but the seemingly endless stream of sexual details eventually blunts both the reader's attention and appetite to continue reading.
The literary equivalent of frozen yogurt—neither rich nor healthy, and not particularly filling.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58005-386-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
