A steamy, liberating tale of self-exploration and self-love that encourages readers to “revel in your sexuality.”
A woman’s divorce opens the floodgates of sex and desire.
After escaping the abusive marriage harrowingly depicted in her debut memoir, Crazy Love (2009), journalist and public speaker Morgan (The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family, 2013, etc.) found happiness in another union, which lasted nearly two decades before falling apart. In excruciating detail, she writes of her marriage souring once her husband had begun examining her and their children “as if we were companies he was planning to take over and sell within a few years,” while she openly admitted to being a different person after gaining weight and becoming embittered. Morgan found herself at a crossroads on the threshold of 50 with two grown children and two failed relationships. Encouraged by friends and family to embrace a fresh beginning, she bought a new Audi and daringly embarked on a dating marathon that sparked a seemingly unquenchable thirst for passion and sexual gratification. Morgan was “ravenous to be held, to be loved, to let a man inside me. To my surprise, the first reward of a starvation diet is that when you’re famished, everything tastes amazing.” Erotic rejuvenation followed, but so did many missteps, including a gaggle of doltish, commitment-shy, grab-and-go men. Though “the intensity of male energy, after a twenty-year absence, felt as revitalizing as inhaling smelling salts,” the “mental gymnastics” spurred by the drama of contemporary dating had her head spinning. Nonetheless, Morgan’s exhilaration at her new life and her reinvigorated sexuality make for thrilling reading. She ably translates her simmering sexcapades as a “MILF” with a chorus of randy men while pondering post-divorce womanhood as a single lady on the prowl. A formidable, addictive storyteller, Morgan provides a highly stimulating story of a midlife education in the messiness of modern sex and love.
A steamy, liberating tale of self-exploration and self-love that encourages readers to “revel in your sexuality.”Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7410-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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