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ALFRED C. KINSEY

A PUBLIC/PRIVATE LIFE

The author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, etc., is portrayed here as homosexual, voyeur, masochist, scientist, and social revolutionary. The first so-called Kinsey Report (1948) blasted Victorian morality by presenting statistical analyses of searching face-to- face interviews with thousands of American men who revealed sexual behavior that was shocking and liberating at the same time. Most men said they masturbated; many had premarital and extramarital sex; many had homoerotic experiences; and a small percentage had sex with animals. If that information—and the much milder revelations in the 1953 Kinsey Report on women—seems old hat now, it created a furor at the time that led all the way from American church pulpits to Congress (where, as recently as 1995, a bill was introduced calling for an investigation of Kinsey's influence on sex education). Beginning with Kinsey's guilt-ridden childhood in New Jersey and an unhappy relationship with an authoritarian father, Jones (History/Univ. of Houston; Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, 1981) describes the scientist's life in the kind of microscopic detail that would have pleased the man who began his career as an entomologist. After earning a Ph.D. from Harvard, Kinsey settled on the faculty of Indiana University. His interest shifted from insects to human sexual behavior because, he said, of his students' questions. Supported for many years by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, he collected countless sexual histories, including those of homosexuals, pedophiles, prisoners, and prostitutes. Citing many anonymous sources, the author also reports that Kinsey privately practiced what he preached about sexual liberation: increasingly painful masochistic techniques, homosexual encounters, and later, with the staff of the Kinsey Institute, wife- and husband-swapping (episodes that were frequently filmed in the attic of Kinsey's home). An exhaustive, compelling portrait of a scientist hailed as both a ``genius'' and a ``dirty old man.''

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-393-04086-0

Page Count: 832

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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