Using his “9 Golden Rules” of infidelity, Rossi teaches women how to successfully cheat on their significant others.
Forget the image of the cheating playboy—or playgirl, in this case—as a good-time Charlene running around on her man and having the time of her life. According to Rossi, cheating—“not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’ proposition”—is hard work, requiring iron discipline, military-caliber planning and a hefty serving of austere self-denial. The author’s self-professed sole qualification as an expert in this field is a lifetime of philandering—except, as he assures his wife in the book’s dedication to her, now that he’s happily, faithfully married. Each chapter delineates one of Rossi’s tried-and-true—from his extensive experience—strategies for getting away with straying, tenets such as “Hide the Evidence,” “Never with Someone You Know” and “Deny Everything.” The trick to a successful affair, according to the author, an aerospace project engineer, is to approach the endeavor with the same cool, logical detachment one might bring to a bank heist. Rossi tries to erase traditionally perceived gender lines by insisting that women can learn to treat sex like men do—as an itch to be scratched. But he falls into every well-trodden gender stereotype—women love chocolate, can’t keep secrets and tend to quickly develop feelings for a sexual partner, especially after 30. And though his target audience is female, under the guise of humorous asides he reveals an unsettlingly sexist view of the fairer sex—women lie, are “dead fish” and should consider “hot lesbian action” if they are toying with the idea of an affair. Rossi doesn’t attempt to apologize for his cheating strategies, such as practicing lying (“That way, you will fall out of the habit of sharing everything with [your mate] so that crucial details won’t slip out when you finally have your fling”). To the contrary, he repeatedly, and unconvincingly, makes the argument that discreet cheating can save relationships and strengthen the institution of marriage. Rossi’s treatise reduces cheating to one more tiresome but necessary chore for today’s busy, multitasking woman to check off her to-do list. Potential value as a competently written, step-by-step how-to from an apparently experienced insider, but often reads more as a gleeful tell-all from a guy who got away with it.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615516714
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Nima
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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