by Peggy Orenstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2016
Ample, valuable information on the way young women in America perceive and react to their sexual environment.
An examination of the newest trends in the sex lives of young women in America.
After interviewing dozens of young women between the ages of 15 and 20, as well as educators, sociologists, psychologists, and other experts, New York Times Magazine contributing writer Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter, 2011, etc.) has compiled an eye-opening study of the way that girls and women in America think, feel, and act regarding sex. With a daughter of her own soon entering this new phase of her life, the author sought to understand the current culture, "at a time when celebrities presented self-objectification as a source of strength, power, independence; when looking desirable seemed a substitute for feeling desire; when 50 Shades of Grey…was being hailed as the ultimate feminine fantasy; when no woman under the age of forty appeared to have pubic hair." What she discovered was both intriguing and highly disturbing. With interviews that lasted for hours, the girls discussed the fine line they walk between dressing to look “hot” and then being called a slut if they engage in too many sexual acts. They were frank about the often unspoken expectations of boys to receive fellatio with no sense of reciprocity and how the act has become so common that most girls don't even consider it sex. Ready access to pornography via the Internet has raised boys' expectations of how girls will react when engaged in intercourse. The girls speak explicitly and honestly about their hookups and the pressures they feel during these casual encounters and the disturbing number of drunken "date rape" incidents. Orenstein also delves into the sexual subculture surrounding fraternities and sororities, which continues the ongoing discussion regarding consent and the meanings of “yes” and “no.” Though the author doesn’t offer many solutions, the abundant information she provides will give parents and young girls the power to make informed decisions regarding sex.
Ample, valuable information on the way young women in America perceive and react to their sexual environment.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-220972-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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