Provocative but regularly flippant.
A radically anti-conservative agenda and biennial campus series known as “Sex Week” are blamed for the alleged corruption of one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.
When Harden arrived at Yale, he was shocked and horrified by what he found. Somehow, just a few years prior to his arrival, the porn industry had inveigled its way onto Yale’s campus under the guise of sexual education during the 11 days of “Sex Week” programming in the spring. Wildly popular among students, Sex Week inundates Yale’s elite student body with lots of talk about sex and tons of free sex toys, condoms and dirty movies. Porn stars like Sasha Gray and Ron Jeremy visit as guest lecturers, taking part in supposedly high-minded panel discussions about human sexuality and the art of pleasure. For Harden, it was all too much and entirely indicative of Yale’s decadent descent into a liberal morass. To his chagrin, naked bedroom romps were even becoming part of his language teacher’s lesson plans. Many of Harden’s targets—topless instructors, unctuous lube seminars and abortion-themed art projects—are easily derided, but other objects of derision, such as a yoga-heavy speech class the author took as part of the drama program, appear suspect. While his tone is relentlessly snarky and dismissive throughout, the author does manage to raise a few important issues about the continued objectification of women and the cheapening of sexual intercourse among college students. He attributes much of Yale’s woes to the university’s long-ago split with its religious roots as a divinity school for colonial elites. While that reasoning may be too ideological for many to seriously entertain, the author’s concern about what students at Yale are learning is valid.
Provocative but regularly flippant.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-61790-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
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
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