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
A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.
An expert popular science account of human speech.
In his latest, New Yorker staff writer Colapinto provides an intensely researched, tightly focused, lucidly written story that is long but not too long. As the author points out, to call human speech a “miraculous feat” understates the case. All other animals “use their voices to make in-the-now proclamations about immediate survival and reproductive concerns, including expressions of fear, anger, hunger and mating urges.” Evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, human language allows us to refer to events in the past or future and to make plans that we share with others, “to build the villages, towns, cities and nations that have given us primacy over the Planet and everything on it.” Even before birth, infants listen, their brains absorbing a dazzling array of tone, phonetics, syntax, patterns, and rules. Despite what early experts taught, language is not pre-installed in the brain at birth; babies learn it, usually accumulating a “mental dictionary” of 60,000 words by age 18. They achieve this because words are not random assemblages of digits. They carry meaning, and we are a species that craves meaning. Midway through the book, Colapinto moves from the mechanism of speech to its purpose. Darwin compared the changes languages undergo to natural selection, but the author disagrees. Over time, he maintains, changes in articulation, accent, and vocabulary have not increased but hobbled their efficiency, creating a Babel of incomprehensible tongues that pushes us apart. Observers claimed that the spread of media, from radio to the internet, would homogenize American speech, but the opposite occurred. Instant communication has combined with bitter ideological, economic, and cultural clashes to accelerate the creation of new American speech patterns. In the final chapter, Colapinto discusses political oratory, which has united Americans in the past. He gives high marks to the rhetoric of presidents such as Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan; however, like the majority of Americans, he considers Trump a divisive force.
A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982128-74-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
An oft-ignored but fully convincing argument that “we cannot prevent the next pandemic without creating a healthy world.”
The Covid-19 pandemic is not a one-off catastrophe. An epidemiologist presents a cogent argument for a fundamental refocusing of resources on “the foundational forces that shape health.”
In this passionate and instructive book, Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, writes that Covid emerged because we have long neglected basic preventative measures. “We invest vast amounts of money in healthcare,” he writes, “but comparatively little in health.” Readers looking to learn how governments (mainly the U.S.) mishandled the pandemic have a flood of books to choose from, but Galea has bigger issues to raise. Better medical care will not stop the next epidemic, he warns. We must structure a world “that is resilient to contagions.” He begins by describing the current state of world health, where progress has been spectacular. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Malnutrition, poverty, and child mortality have dropped. However, as the author stresses repeatedly, medical progress contributed far less to the current situation than better food, clean water, hygiene, education, and prosperity. That’s the good news. More problematic is that money is a powerful determinant of health; those who have it live longer. Galea begins the bad news by pointing out the misleading statistic that Covid-19 kills less than 1% of those infected; that applies to young people in good health. For those over 60, it kills 6%, for diabetics, over 7%, and those with heart disease, over 10%. It also kills more Blacks than Whites, more poor than middle-class people, and more people without health insurance. The author is clearly not just interested in Covid. He attacks racism, sexism, and poverty in equal measure, making a plea for compassion toward stigmatized conditions such as obesity and addiction. He consistently urges the U.S. government, which has spared no expense and effort to defeat the pandemic, to do the same for social injustice.
An oft-ignored but fully convincing argument that “we cannot prevent the next pandemic without creating a healthy world.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-757642-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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