don't stop to think about how sleazy the Finzes' own project is.
Still another volume of sexual fantasies, helpfully subdivided into threesomes, prostitution, exhibitionism, etc., from the
apparently insatiable Finzes (Erotic Confessions, 1998, etc.). A construction worker who lets a charity auction off six hours of his time ends up serving as a sex slave to three women; a flat-chested young woman passes herself off as an unshirted male on a public beach; a peeping Tom is discovered (by his wife) watching a neighboring couple through a telescope. No, it's not Penthouse Forum; it's a group of two dozen forbidden fantasies—most of them (if the authors are to be believed) acted out in real life—that the Finzes have brought together to show us that our own most secret longings are not so unusual after all. If the analysis provided by the Finzes doesn't cut much deeper than what you'd likely find at your local hairdresser or barber shop, it has to be said that the people who get their hair cut alongside you probably aren't nearly so forthcoming about their erotic fantasies (although the Finzes suspect they have fantasies of their own). "We will not attempt to offer any explanation for the attractions our informants described," they sagely warn in introducing their chapter on garment fetishes (a woman who cherishes memories of her leather orgies as a biker, a maintenance worker who collects panties from the college dorms he works in). Their sole therapeutic recommendation: Consider sharing your fantasies with your mate. Or, better yet (in a stunning example of the closed feedback loop), send them to the Finzes, who supply their Website, e-mail, and snail-mail addresses so that you can help them work on their next installment. The ideal pillow book for readers who, caught up in the authors' bland assurances that there's nothing wrong with fantasies,
don't stop to think about how sleazy the Finzes' own project is.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25344-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
An engrossing, informative, and sometimes-frightening medical account that ends on an inspirational high note.
A debut memoir explores love, cancer, and learning to live in the moment.
On June 29, 2012, Slaby and her husband, Michael, were preparing to finish work (she at a Chicago law firm, he with the Barack Obama re-election campaign) before boarding a plane for New York to attend a friend’s wedding. But first she had to see her doctor. She had been suffering from shortness of breath. Her physician detected a heart irregularity and insisted she see a cardiologist immediately. What followed became a nightmare medical saga. X-rays and CT scans revealed a grapefruit-sized tumor pressing down on her heart: “My tumor was pushing on my heart, which reacted to protect itself by filling the sac where it lives with fluid. There was so much fluid, however, that my heart was under attack from its own protection.” The author was diagnosed with stage 2 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Chemotherapy, the prescribed treatment, first involved discussions of how to preserve her fertility. She was only 33 years old. While the tumor was not removed surgically, chemotherapy successfully shrank it. And then a December 2012 follow-up PET scan showed her thymus lighting up. It could be nothing—the tumor, now one-quarter of its original size, may have wound around her thymus. Or it could be something dire. The ensuing surgery involved cracking open her chest. Then a medical error almost caused her death. Slaby’s narrative is about much more than cancer. Although the unusual complexity of the sequential medical emergencies the author endured, which she details in lucid, graphic prose, threatens to overwhelm the memoir, she also presents a tender love story. Slaby deftly intersperses portions that recall the shifting up-and-down dynamics of her long relationship with Michael. These sections, despite the periods of great turmoil, offer readers respite from the grueling medical drama. As she worked toward physical, psychological, and emotional recovery, the author meticulously documents how difficult it was for her, a self-described “control freak,” to let go of the past and find “grace and kindness inside the unexpected.”
An engrossing, informative, and sometimes-frightening medical account that ends on an inspirational high note.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63331-028-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entertaining and enlightening history of how the practice of cosmetic surgery has been shaped by the priorities and demands of 20th-century American culture as much as by those of the medical profession. To characterize the shift in American attitudes toward cosmetic surgery, Haiken (History/Univ. of Tennessee) notes that when Fanny Brice had her nose bobbed in the 1920s, Americans asked why, whereas in the 1960s, when Barbra Streisand didn't, they asked why not. Haiken's history is full of anecdotes about surgeons and patients, excerpts from the popular press, especially women's magazines, and quotes from the medical literature. It is also extensively illustrated with movie and television stills, cartoons, before-and-after photos, and advertisements—including an astonishing one for a ``Homely Girl Contest'' run by the New York Daily Mirror in 1924. Haiken details how this field of surgery developed after WW I, the attempts of the American Board of Plastic Surgery to control its practice, and the discovery by surgeons that prosperity lay not in reconstructive but in purely cosmetic surgery. She reveals how surgeons who were reluctant to be linked to ``beauty'' doctors found medical justification for cosmetic procedures in psychology: They were curing inferiority complexes caused by patients' perceived imperfections. While facial surgery receives the greater part of Haiken's attention, she also gives a brief history of breast surgery and touches on liposuction and penile enhancement. Perhaps most interesting is her discussion of the use of plastic surgery to conceal or minimize physical signs of ethnicity. Using Michael Jackson as a case in point, she demonstrates the desire of many members of minority groups to conform to narrow American ideals of beauty. A warts-and-all portrait of a medical speciality that still evokes ambivalence in individuals and in the culture at large.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5763-5
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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