Readers interested in parting the curtains at the Turkish bathhouse and the Chinese baojian anmo will find this an excellent...
Part travelogue, part commentary on the art of massage.
Cook (The Exact Unknown and Other Tales of Modern China, 2014, etc.) says from the start: “Massage is always already erotic.” From there, he takes readers on a pleasure cruise: a massage school in Chicago (“What an antidote to the cerebral mortification of the University of Chicago!”); a subgenre of Japanese pornography relating to (allegedly) secretly recorded massage sessions (“I do not know how the average enthusiast of Japanese porn responds to this particular genre”); and a wide range of locations in China and Southeast Asia: “A hot woman in Hanoi came up on a motorcycle. ‘Marijuana? Massage?’ she asked, inviting me to jump on.” Throughout it all, Cook offers blunt commentary and matter-of-fact testimonials. There’s the disappointment of a “chocolate” massage in Thailand: “She shows me a small bowl filled with oil and a clump of congealed chocolate at the bottom. If it weren’t for her accomplished stroking which quickly brings me off, I’d be pretty upset.” And a pleasant surprise in Taiwan: “The woman’s rare combination of expert technique and open-mindedness makes for one of the most intense massages I have ever had.” As good as it might feel, the book isn’t for the squeamish or the prudish: an essay on semen likens it to “the toxic venom ejected from an alien,” and a commentary on randy masseuses explains how many are horny and ready for extra fun, at no extra cost. Comparisons of international hand jobs can become dull, and readers are likely to disagree with his assertion that “every act of sexual intercourse should be paid for,” but Cook’s affection for the massage never wavers. His book offers a fascinating portrait of a man who has ventured into the titillating establishments the world has to offer.
Readers interested in parting the curtains at the Turkish bathhouse and the Chinese baojian anmo will find this an excellent place to begin.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988744578
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Magic Theater Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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