A sex therapist invites readers to improve their own sex lives by learning from the turn-ons of others. San Francisco therapist Morin developed his Sexual Excitement Survey in the mid-1980s and since then has obtained from some 351 anonymous men and women, both straight and gay, descriptions of their peak erotic encounters and fantasies. Through analysis of their accounts and through his work as a therapist, Morin has come to some conclusions about eroticism, the most important being that it is paradoxical in nature: both joyful and dangerous, life-giving and troublesome. One day while contemplating the elegance of the equation Attraction + Obstacles = Excitement, he had a sudden insight: that eroticism has four cornerstoneslonging and anticipation, violating prohibitions, searching for power, and overcoming ambivalence. Morin also finds that six emotionsexuberance, satisfaction, closeness, anxiety, guilt, and angerare associated with peak erotic experiences and that a unifying scenario, or core erotic theme, shapes each individual's turn-ons. These ideas are explored and illustrated at some length with excerpts from survey responses, passages that some readers may find more of a turn-off than a turn-on, for their language is often crude, colorful, and explicit. Readers are urged to keep private sex journals and to explore their own core erotic themes. For those with what Morin terms ``troublesome turn-ons,'' he proposes a 7- step program for positive erotic change, which he takes care to distinguish from any existing 12-step self-help programs. For those who wish to participate in Morin's ongoing study of eroticism, a copy of his Sex Excitement Survey is provided in an appendix. Interesting for its paradoxical perspective on eroticism, but too abstract to be a truly effective self-help program. ($35,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016975-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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