A delightfully audacious anthology of carnal confessionals.
A creative appreciation of human sexuality through art and anecdotes.
Inspired by the sexy stories of others, Rothman began gathering anonymous submissions of people’s intimate tales, and she presents the material in a narrative diversified across location, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation. In this attractive volume, she teams up with frequent New York Times co-collaborator Feinberg, hitting the streets of New York and New Orleans to solicit stories about people’s carnal desires and apprehensions. The result is a book brimming with titillating, provocative artwork and essays about the vast terrain of the human sexual experience. Among the most memorable topics and sections: gender and sexual fluidity; the trials and triumphs of an intersex advocate; Feinberg’s poignant essay about the “twisted mindset” caused by her body dysmorphic disorder; a section about a “professional masturbator” who “teach[es] groups how to masturbate”; a female contributor’s list of “10 Things To Do When You’re Horny & Lonely”; a 67-year-old man’s first experience with gay sex; a gay man’s celebration of his HIV-positive status, which “gave me the gift of having to look at myself….It saved my life”; and the enigmas of vaginismus and sexsomnia (“While asleep, not consciously, I will initiate sex with the person I’m in bed with”). An impressively diverse blend of artistry and perspective, Rothman and Feinberg’s book is an entertaining and insightful voyeuristic playground affording a sneak peek inside the bedrooms of everyday people divulging their unbridled desires, fetishes, and complex relationship dynamics. These stories mirror the sexual conventions of a mostly liberated modern society—though some contributors have been challenged by conservative religious upbringings or racial polarization, and others emerged from cultures that shame or restrict the pursuit of sexual fulfillment. Most of the material is explicitly frank and features a liberating body-positive honesty sure to delight any reader fascinated by stories of human sexuality.
A delightfully audacious anthology of carnal confessionals.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-42658-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Voracious/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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