by Mara Altman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2009
Fails to deliver on the wit of its double-entendre title.
A former Village Voice staff writer takes a journalist’s approach to her personal problem.
Altman demonstrates that she is no prudish virgin by offering readers detailed background on her unsatisfactory, unorgasmic experiences with men in India, Myanmar and Peru. Back in New York, she provides determinedly flippant reports on encounters with various sex experts: Betty, whom she dubs “the CEO of masturbation”; Zola, her “sexual Socrates”; and Eric, “the Pussy Whisperer.” The author masturbated inside an MRI machine so a sex researcher could record changes in her brain. She interviewed practitioners of orgasmic meditation and a producer of porno films. She sought the help of male and female sex surrogates, getting instruction in the use of dildos and suggestively named vibrators. She attended sex seminars, a workshop on Tantric energy orgasms and a sleep-away orgasm camp she dubbed “Pussy Willow Ranch.” (Supposedly cool nicknames abound; “Clitty Rose” becomes the author’s moniker for the relevant portion of her own anatomy.) This is a personal saga, not a research report. One chapter focuses briefly on someone else’s genitalia, describing Altman’s visit to a vaginal rejuvenation center to observe “Designer Laser Vaginoplasty,” but the subject is abruptly dropped. In the next chapter, the author’s obsession with her failure to achieve orgasm leads her to search for genetic clues to the source of her problem by interviewing her surprisingly frank grandparents and her less forthcoming parents. Verbatim conversations and play-by-play descriptions of earnest, purposeful sexual activities suggest either perfect recall on the writer’s part or a blurring of fact and fiction.
Fails to deliver on the wit of its double-entendre title.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-157711-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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by Mara Altman
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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