An erotically provocative memoir.
A spirited autobiography of love and lust.
British author Dale’s debut memoir charts his life as a “risk-taking, left-leaning northern English ‘rock,’ ” and includes many vividly described erotic interludes. Now in his 50s, he admits to still having a young spirit and a competitive, confrontational, spontaneous and highly sexual demeanor. He impressively displays these attributes throughout this expansive personal history, which begins with his Manchester, England, childhood in the 1960s as the second of five sons. He writes of his grief at losing his father to cancer early on; he was raised by his mother, an avid Labour Party supporter, who eventually remarried. Later, he recalls experiencing inexplicable sexual arousal at 6 years old, an occurrence which increased in regularity as he became a man. Anecdotes about his school days, which include tales of skirt-chasing, soon morph into stories of his stint in the Royal Navy romping through European ports of call and marrying young—all while dealing with insatiable sexual urges. Running alongside his own life story is that of “Lauren,” who marries a man named Dick and bears a daughter, Kaylie. The two families converge in a series of family outings, during which the author becomes enamored of Lauren, thus igniting sexual escapades that are eventually revealed to Dick and many others. Both come clean to their respective spouses, and Dick becomes angrily resentful. Afterward, in a chatty, conversational tone, the author tells of his and Lauren’s sexual life of multiple-partner fantasy fulfillment, which is far from the “conveyor belt normality” of traditional marriage. Both Dale and Lauren readily admit to being people who “never stood still sexually,” and their unapologetic tour of a progressive, unconventional union is on full display here.
An erotically provocative memoir.Pub Date: April 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495284700
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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