A raunchy memoir revealing a visceral connection to the Bard.
With a fetish for being spanked, Keenan sees sex in nearly every Shakespearean play.
In her debut memoir, the author admits to being “obsessed with spankings.” Her fetish, she writes, “isn’t something I do. It’s something I am.” She has no interest in ferreting out the cause of “this bizarre obsession,” finding introspection “exhausting….The psychological and social implications of my inner life were so disturbing to me that I could rarely force myself to confront them.” Instead, her sexuality informs her reading of Shakespeare. In The Tempest, for example, she identifies with the wild Caliban. “I longed for Caliban because I longed to uncage myself, and the ravenous sexual terrors in me….I longed for Caliban’s ugly honesty and the unselfconsciousness of his impulses.” Keenan is captivated by the “erotic potential” of cross-dressing in Twelfth Night, which speaks to her “specific erotic quirks to an absurd degree.” Besides offering her take on 14 plays, including Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Romeo and Juliet (it’s about lust, not love, the author insists), King Lear, Othello, and, not surprisingly, The Taming of the Shrew, Keenan provides graphic recountings of her sexual liaisons. In Spain, where she went after dropping out of high school, she met John, who fulfilled her needs repeatedly and energetically, with his bare hand, a belt, and a ruler, with which he paddled her “hard, thirty or forty times in rapid succession” and then, after a short break, 10 more. The author maintains that she could control how much, or how long, the spanking continued. “Kink is more collaborative than it appears,” she writes. When she fell in love, she was unsatisfied by sex until she persuaded her lover to spank her. One day, he improvised, spanking her “to the rhythm of iambic pentameter.” Reader, she married him.
A raunchy memoir revealing a visceral connection to the Bard.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237871-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
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.
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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