A direct and no-nonsense manual to help young people navigate the world of intimacy.
A guide for adolescent readers explores the intricacies of sex and romance.
Alexander’s (Creating Your Life, 2018, etc.) compact manual acknowledges at the outset that there’s often a problem with the way young people are instructed about the two subjects that excite their curiosity the most: sex and love. As the author points out, they are often given stern warnings and vague generalizations but nothing specific or helpful. His book attempts to rectify this problem, laying out clearly worded basics on everything from sex to dating to marriage to the fundamental differences—biological, mental, and emotional—between boys and girls. At every stage of the guide, Alexander takes a step back in order to look at the big picture of what he’s discussing, and, as in his other books, he then shapes the outlines of that picture with the Socratic method of asking a series of clarifying questions. Under the heading of maintaining healthy communications in marriages and long-term relationships, for example, readers are asked, “Do you actively listen to your beloved? Do you maintain eye contact and respond thoughtfully? Do you and your beloved engage in regular activities together? Do you share pleasures?” At the heart of Alexander’s comments about sex is his insistence that it is an intoxicant, something that can impair judgment as certainly and negatively as alcohol. His call to action is the same here as in his other manuals: “Are you ready to do the hard work of transforming yourself into a different kind of person?” The advice in these pages is generally keen and perceptive, although there are odd lapses, particularly in the chapter “What Girls Should Know About Boys,” which delivers a long string of oddly ad hominem generalizations about boys—that they have little problem forgetting about girls immediately after sex; that they don’t perceive indirect communication; etc. Parents of boys will likely find these kinds of assertions confusing. But the bulk of the guide’s advice is invaluable, particularly for young readers in search of clear answers.
A direct and no-nonsense manual to help young people navigate the world of intimacy.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937597-22-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: The School of Pythagoras
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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