Candid instruction and enthusiasm buck any notion that readers are ever too old for satisfying sex.
A debut manual rejects the idea that the elderly can’t have active and exciting sex lives.
Grant’s perceptive guide puts a strong focus on senior men—who can no longer rely on the energy of youth or even reliable erections to sustain their passion for sexual activity—and post-menopausal women, shrugging off the idea that with age must come celibacy. More of a self-help and instructional resource than a scholarly one, the book nonetheless provides extensive background for many of its conclusions, looking at the history of the sexual revolution, the proliferation of blunt advice and pornography on the internet, the chemical responses humans share with animals, and the physical reactions the human body has to stimulation. Information on the work’s 16 types of orgasms and ways to reach them are included as well. In addition, the author provides techniques that range from the romantic to the clinical in discovering how to stimulate a partner or oneself, emphasizing the normalcy of such practices while answering age-old questions like “Does size matter?” and examining the “vital skill” of female ejaculation. Not purely physical in its interests, the book also seeks to inform monogamous couples on how to keep tensions and conflicts low in their relationships while encouraging a self-study of inhibitions and their origins. Much as it encourages readers to do so, the guide likes to tease the audience, offering bits of advice only to follow up with more detailed instructions later. This repetition is explicitly intended to help with retention but will likely be discouraging to readers who wish to easily revisit specific tips. While the manual supplies a short bibliography, stronger in-text citations would have helped to separate the anecdotal from the factual, and photographs or illustrations might have better conveyed certain techniques. But the guide’s commitment to ending the stigma of conversations about sex, particularly among seniors, active or not (there’s even a brief chapter on performing with physical limitations), remains admirable and effective in its straightforward ardor.
Candid instruction and enthusiasm buck any notion that readers are ever too old for satisfying sex.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4581-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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