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WHY GOOD SEX MATTERS

UNDERSTANDING THE NEUROSCIENCE OF PLEASURE FOR A SMARTER, HAPPIER, AND MORE PURPOSE-FILLED LIFE

A rewarding text steeped in laboratory analysis and thought-provoking, motivating patient-based conclusions.

The fascinating science behind the intersection of sexual pleasure and brain functionality.

In her debut book, cognitive neuroscientist and sex therapist Wise presents the “culmination of many decades” of scientific study dedicated to sex and its effects on the human brain. Findings from the author’s clinical neurobiological research comprise the first sections of the book, in which Wise reveals how the primal emotional brain and its serpentine circuitry helps to drive our ability to experience joy. In many of her clients, the author recognized a “pleasure crisis,” whereby debilitating symptoms like anxiety, stress, and chronic depression stifle one’s ability to feel gratification. Though addictive quick fixes such as TV and social media have become exceedingly popular, their effects are fleeting, and anhedonia—an inability to experience pleasure—briskly returns to dull the psyche. Wise examines how we arrived at this crossroads by way of our historic ambivalence toward pleasure; while “we are intrinsically sexual beings,” the number of roadblocks obstructing the pathways to true sexual satisfaction increases with age and the complexities of modern life. The author describes our “seven emotional systems” and how understanding them “is the first step to bringing your own brain-body into balance and returning to pleasure.” Wise then introduces patients from her psychotherapy practice whose personal happiness has been hijacked by emotional imbalances and a lack of brain pleasure chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine, which are released through touch and orgasm. For readers less scientifically attuned, the book’s second half clearly addresses core issues of sex and pleasure through the practices of “good sex tools” (yoga, breathing exercises, etc.) to promote better self-care, erotic empowerment, and a heightened understanding of what role sex plays in our lives. Featuring a harmonious blend of clinical research and relatable instruction, the book will appeal to sexuality specialists and lay readers seeking guidance on matters of achieving pleasure.

A rewarding text steeped in laboratory analysis and thought-provoking, motivating patient-based conclusions.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-328-45130-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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