SEX: The Facts, the Acts, and Your Feelings

Patient, in-depth exploration of virtually all sex and gender issues by a professor (Community Health Education, Hunter College) and chairperson of SIECUS. The format is time-tested: discussion of topics from birth control to homosexuality to men's and women's ""systems,"" buoyed up by question-and-answer elaborations: ""How do doctors cure a transvestite?"" (someone asks lecturer Carrera), or ""Can young men have prostate problems?"" Carrera is fond of exploring different facets of each subject--such as cultural or religious considerations (not just re birth control or abortion); prevalent myths; side effects (of drugs both legal and illegal); feelings; and ""facts"": usually just that, but occasionally confused with opinion, as in the ""fact"" that ""Everyone is sexual and has a right to express his or her sexuality,"" a prelude to discussions of sex and disability. Some interesting and less common considerations also come up: body image, for example, or how to have a full sex life after spinal cord injury or one of the ostomies. Carrera gives evidence of having weighed all the available clinical studies; and he is generally quick to point out that while one particular school of thought holds with a certain theory, another takes a different tack--making the book a sort of sex education in microcosm for the truly uninitiated. Those who favor the authoritative, encyclopedia-informational approach, rather than the questionnaires and surveys of Kinsey or Hite, will find this fills the bill neatly and succinctly.