A messy but enlightening guide to a growing lifestyle.
A practitioner of BSDM for more than 30 years gives advice and safety tips for the beginner in this erotic how-to manual.
Cascia (I Am Adam I Am Eve, 2015) answers the question “Where do I begin?” for novices exploring the world of bondage-discipline and dominance-submission. The first word pairing does not necessarily incorporate the second one, and the author also stresses that neither has anything to do with sex. Rather, they are emotional/psychological/physical outlets that have more to do with relationships, trust, and boundaries. Since BSDM is so often confused with outright abuse or mislabeled as “sick,” he takes pains to describe the difference between mutually agreed upon limits and safe words in a pairing that explores intimacy and the uncaring and exploitative nature of partner abuse. Partner abuse, he asserts, is fueled by narcissism and a fear of intimacy. Consent is, of course, stressed, but Cascia emphasizes several times the importance of informed consent—neither party can proceed without a clear, mutual understanding of what is going to happen. Of course the amount of details will vary with the participants, but the author insists on a baseline of expectations. For example, never leave a partner bound alone in a room (a nanny cam must be employed if being “alone” is part of the fantasy) and adequately support the submissive’s head if face slapping will occur. The level of preparation, education, and trust needed deftly comes across here. The author also warns that the novice should be aware of the border between consensual role playing and true mind games. The manual’s content is intriguing and illuminating, written in a straightforward, if clumsy, style, more like a pamphlet than a book. But the many misspellings and syntax errors are unfortunate (“Needs to be thought-out and studied on an induvial basis”; “Communication is EXTREAMLEY INPORTANT!”; “collard” for collared; “INMFORMED CONSENT”). The mistakes are quite distracting, and the odd line breaks, sometimes in midsentence, do not help. But the text offers a helpful questionnaire and glossary and provides valuable insights and maturity in this portrayal of human relationships.
A messy but enlightening guide to a growing lifestyle.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-981138-77-7
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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