by James A. Grant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2018
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
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by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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by Bonnie Tsui
by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012
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
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