Whoopee! In spite of assaults from the likes of Anthony Comstock, Catharine MacKinnon, Bill Clinton, and the Legion of Decency, sex has survived and thrived in this century. That much at least is clear from this abbreviated history put together by author Petersen (author of Playboy’s popular sex advice column for 20 years) and edited and with a Foreword by Hugh Hefner himself. Essentially a complilation of tidbits, enlivened occasionally by excerpts from erotic literature (Sons and Lovers, The Amboy Dukes, etc.), this volume also makes it clear that sex was not discovered in the 1960s, but that it was a highly popular, if much maligned, pastime as early as 1900. That was when Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were on the move to seize books, postcards, newspapers, and any other material he deemed obscene. The first decade was also the time of the girl in the red velvet swing, hysteria about white slavery, and Havelock Ellis spreading the seditious idea that sex was not only natural, but healthy. Subsequent decades saw dance halls, movie theaters, and women’s suffrage begin to loosen puritanical bonds, as did World War I and Margaret Sanger’s campaign for birth control. With World War II came penicillin, the first volume of the Kinsey report, and continuing battles over censorship; the 1950s saw increasing concern over sexual deviation (including homosexuality) and the first issue of Playboy. Next, in Petersen’s relentlessly obvious catalogue, came the flower children, feminism, and the pill, followed by a wave of so-called pornography and AIDS. The 1990s have given us technologically enhanced sex, via phone and Internet. Each chapter wraps with a snapshot of names, events, and statistics of the decade. A mosaic that is less colorful and titillating than one might imagine, but rewarding in its reminder of the deep roots of the sexual revolution. (32 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1652-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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