A titillating story for the Fifty Shades set that plumbs the complex, intimate head space of the sexually submissive.
A British woman’s epiphanic transformation from bored divorcee to kinky, sensual slave.
Anonymous author Sarah K’s novelistic memoir begins sheepishly enough with the author querying her best girlfriends for creative sex scenes to incorporate into an erotic story she’d been writing as “the perfect escape from the realities of a crumbling marriage.” But when she found herself a 40-something, divorced, single mother of three grown children, the writing project effectively stoked the flames of a latent fascination with bondage. Intent on finding the “hero” of her sexual fantasies, the author fumbled through online dating and then met Max, a tall, handsome, entrepreneurial “Dom” who immediately asserts respectful authority with a consensual docility contract and “safe words.” The dom/sub dance began, awkward and fumbling at first, with the placement of an ownership collar, dungeon play and a lingering scene at a kinky dinner party. Yielding to Max’s brinkmanship eventually neutralized her physical insecurities, and the memoir unfurls further through episodes of explicitly described, unbridled surrender. No stranger to the game, Max cautioned her at the onset of their arrangement that a BDSM relationship “changes your life forever.” As her transformative journey progressed, it dramatically redefined the author’s psychological and sexual boundaries, changes she initially found herself resistant to grasp. These boundaries became blurred, however, when the author allowed her romantic love to sully their hierarchal dynamic. Written with verve, Sarah K’s narrative bolsters an already provocative story that is thankfully allowed to play out organically without overextrapolating the base semantics of the BDSM lifestyle.
A titillating story for the Fifty Shades set that plumbs the complex, intimate head space of the sexually submissive.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-00-750621-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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