An entertaining and educational firsthand account of an older woman’s single sexual life.
The pseudonymous Mrs. Hot offers a guide to women nearing 60 who are currently in—or planning to join—the dating scene, featuring accounts of her personal experiences and tips on beauty and self-confidence.
Following her divorce, the debut author was a single mother who spent two decades in voluntary celibacy. But after her son left home, she felt it was time for a change. In her late 50s, she opted to transform into a person she called “Mrs. Hot” and start dating again. In this first book of a planned duology, she details her various life changes, from leaving her unnamed “highly stressful public service job from hell” to getting cosmetic surgery, including Botox treatment. She also took up dieting and exercise, mainly because she wanted a “smokin’ hot body” to attract men. She offers her readers numerous tips, including on how to choose the right perfume, adopt good posture, and radiate confidence in order to feel, think, act, and be sexy. Her specific advice on dating, meanwhile, focuses primarily on the online variety. Along the way, Mrs. Hot warns of potential scammers—including men who have no intention of having any interactions beyond the virtual—and provides a bevy of suggestions for stimulating sexting. Later, she shares some of her own escapades in the post-50 dating world. They include dates with men of various ages; some were selfless lovers, she says, while others were complete misfires, such as one man who seemed more interested in a movie than he was in Mrs. Hot. This work will likely be encouraging to women who share the author’s age and relationship status. Although Mrs. Hot does promote the benefits of physical beauty, she also maintains that true attractiveness comes from within; throughout the book, she encourages women to release their “Inner Goddess.” She also highlights the power of positive thinking and the importance of loving oneself. She does, however, seem to contradict herself when she says that those who are obese and happy “are simply rationalizing their way to eating whatever they want.” Mrs. Hot’s prose is concise, with many instances of clever wordplay, particularly in chapter subtitles, such as “Taking Delivery of the U.S. Male” or “I Experience Getting Lust in the Stacks.” Indeed, her accounts of sexual encounters are similarly more playful than they are erotic. For instance, she writes that a 27-year-old “nice Italian boy” named Daniele “gave me a full, passionate serving of his native tongue—and I don’t mean a lesson in Italian.” The erotic tales in this book eschew BDSM (“It’s Fifty Shades of Nay, in my opinion”) and occur in places that some readers may feel are sex-fantasy clichés (such as a plane, a movie theater, and a beach). Nevertheless, the author’s dating stories, while a mixed bag, are often delightful—and on more than one occasion, she intriguingly tells of deepening feelings (love, perhaps?) for a man she was seeing.
An entertaining and educational firsthand account of an older woman’s single sexual life.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9912051-9-6
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Written Warrior Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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