A quick, lighthearted skip through one man’s sexual conquests.
A tell-all interview with a man who says he’s made love to hundreds of women.
Sitting with his longtime friend G in a New York City hotel, debut author Baccala asks questions based on G’s claim to have slept with hundreds of women in his lifetime. From pickup strategies to sexual techniques, what has G learned from his vast trove of experience? Beginning with G’s concept of what is “sexy”—“when a woman’s body stimulates my hormones to a level where I’m solely driven to penetrate her and have a happy moment”—the book goes on to explore everything from the finer components of oral sex (“Take my word for it, muff-diving requires a hell of a lot of know-how”) to the inherent differences among Asian women: “Let me start by saying that there is an impression out there that all Oriental or Asian women are more or less the same in looks and nature. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Interspersed with G’s memories of the women who’ve helped him increase his number of sexual partners, the book reads as a limited biography of sorts. Though not much is revealed about the man behind the figures, a portrait is painted of a series of consensual flings, occasional prostitutes and a man with a keen sense of whether or not a woman is willing to sleep with him. Full of reflections unclouded by political correctness or incredulity (for all of G’s successful one-night stands, there seem to be plenty that didn’t pan out), G’s anecdotes have an honest feel. What the stories gain in candor, however, they tend to lack in depth. As readers get past G’s bawdy feelings on Hispanic women—“They are vigorous and energetic in the sexual act”—they’ll probably see little to differentiate G from all the other Don Juans of the world.
A quick, lighthearted skip through one man’s sexual conquests.Pub Date: May 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481743853
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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