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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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