by Jillian Keenan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 2016
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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