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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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