by Roger Friedland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 2014
Intelligent, thoughtful and well-researched, Friedland’s book is not only a love letter to Rome, but also to his daughters...
Cultural sociologist Friedland (Religious Studies and Sociology/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 2006, etc.) examines the life-changing “love lessons” he learned from the city of Rome.
For the author, the Italian city became a personal touchstone for love and romance after he and his wife honeymooned there as a young couple. He would return to the city several times afterward, growing more fascinated each time with the way Romans combined sex and love without guilt, shame or fear. In the early 2000s, just as his two girls were entering adolescence, he was offered a chance to teach students at the University of Rome, students who had very different ideas about sex and love than their American counterparts. As Friedland watched his daughters begin to negotiate puberty away from the “West Coast world of blowjobs and Botox,” he came to know students for whom affection and loyalty were crucial parts of the erotic—and eventually, marriage—equation. The author suggests that this attitude stems from the way male and female bodies are openly celebrated and enjoyed in Italian culture and from the fact that in Italy, personal and familial connections serve as a bulwark against unreliable institutions. In the U.S., where an element of shame has always traditionally surrounded sexuality, it is more difficult for young people to reconcile romance with the erotic. The sexual revolution, which was supposed to liberate people from inhibition, actually had the unintended consequence of separating emotion from sex and exalting “pleasure at the expense of tenderness.” The result has been the creation of a loveless society, where, notes the author sagely, “marriage is imagined as a contract for self-realization and sex a consumption good.”
Intelligent, thoughtful and well-researched, Friedland’s book is not only a love letter to Rome, but also to his daughters and the members of their generation, for whose personal happiness he fears.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062325587
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More by Roger Friedland
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
18
Our Verdict
GET IT
Google Rating
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2016
New York Times Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.