A book marinated in provocative assertions that are certain to instigate debate and productive discussion.
A witty discussion of the indirect role sex plays across political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes.
Veteran pop-culture journalist Benes, who has worked for Esquire and Deadspin, first addresses the sordid history of monogamy and its pervasiveness in Western society as more than just a social construct but rather a conditioned and normalized mating system. The author presents the argument that devotion as a kind of “sexual conditioning” has both contentment consequences (i.e., divorce via infidelity) and social benefits. Benes then examines the public perception of political sex scandals throughout history (including our “Founding Fornicators”) and what he considers the “true significance” of pornography, and he discusses uproarious case studies on the hidden sex-related histories of products like corn flakes and graham crackers. Having snarkily documented a visit to a Scientology center for Esquire, Benes is no stranger to immersion journalism, but he digs freely and critically into more scandalous territory in chapters detailing the failure of the condom initiative in Uganda in stemming AIDS infections, veiled homosexuality in the military, and the “prevalence of gay priests” in the Catholic church. Throughout the narrative, the author provides generous, often entertaining footnotes—e.g., “law scholar Richard Posner theorized Catholic rituals might attract homosexuals. The adornment, theatrical expression, music, incense, and lavish garb might appeal more to a gay man than a straight man.” As a probing, multifaceted commentary on the social science of sex and society, Benes’ book succeeds in corralling a litany of ideas and opinions that may ruffle some readers’ feathers. Regardless of the possible unpopularity of his conclusions, however, the author consistently makes salient points: “The only thing perplexing about a powerful person using their traits and resources to obtain sex is that people are surprised whenever it happens.” Benes ably explores society’s perceptions and applications of sex in ways that are “worth studying, rather than sensationalizing.”
A book marinated in provocative assertions that are certain to instigate debate and productive discussion.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4742-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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