Readers may appreciate some of this book’s sewing tips, but it falls short as a more general guide to revitalizing marital...
This marital advice book by the pseudonymous author ScissorMan offers an unusual idea: cutting up a spouse’s clothes.
The author isn’t a therapist or researcher, but he writes that he’s been in a loving, sexually active marriage for 50 years. In this book, he shares his ideas about what makes his marriage work. His main strategy for adding variety to their sex life, he says, is to make various revealing outfits for his wife instead of buying expensive lingerie. He doesn’t pretend to have advanced sewing experience; instead, he’s found less skill-intensive ways to modify thrift-store clothes for use in the bedroom. His book offers some helpful illustrations of these methods but no step-by-step diagrams. There’s a lot of creativity involved here, and some of the ideas may be inspiring for couples who are interested in this type of play. There seems to be a certain lack of awareness, however, that the idea may not appeal to every reader. The book also includes lectures about how men think, and other chapters make specific reference to the Bible and to other marriage advice books. The author admonishes wives to maintain their physical appearances for their husbands’ benefit and also reminds women of the Biblical teaching to respect their husbands: “Lack of respect is also probably the main cause of marital problems by women who have been brainwashed by the Feminist Movement,” he says. Unfortunately, this idea places much of the burden of repairing a marriage on the wife. Such conservative thoughts about gender roles and marriage seem at odds with the book’s explicit tone, and they may alienate readers who would have otherwise taken an interest in the clothing.
Readers may appreciate some of this book’s sewing tips, but it falls short as a more general guide to revitalizing marital sex.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9837189-1-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Master Lover Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Lively enough, in contradistinction to its subject, this workmanlike volume of literary history traces the underexamined phenomenon of boredom. Boredom, Spacks (Gossip, 1985; English/Univ. of Virginia) informs us, is a social construction of recent vintage. The figure of ``the bore'' first appeared in the mid-18th century; the idea of boredom emerged, like the novel, in the wake of early modernity's development of the concept of leisure. Boredom and popular writing have intimate links: Writers seek above all to be interesting (i.e., not boring), and readers follow their interests in reading, evading boredom. Not coincidentally, boredom has long fascinated popular writers as a subject. Spacks builds on these observations in developing her history of boredom in English literature. Reconsidering narration as a strategy for reclaiming life from boredom, she discusses how a wide variety of 18th-century fiction and correspondence treats that state of mind. Her investigation reveals that boredom often masks more pointed discomforts, even serving as a subtle form of aggression against resented environments. A look at how Jane Austen disciplines her title character in Emma provides a case study in what Spacks calls ``the normalization of boredom.'' As sociology has charted the spread of boredom through society, writers have continued to explore the implications of its pervasiveness and to mount resistances to it. In her final chapters, Spacks considers boredom in the context of works by such authors as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Donald Barthelme, and Anita Brookner. However, the interest/boredom opposition, always fairly crude, seems especially inadequate for describing modern fiction, with its self-consciously alienating effects. Her discussion also lacks a real reckoning with the entertainment marketplace's appeals to (and cultivation of) boredom in the consumers of its stimulations. Nevertheless, Spacks opens up promising ground for further investigations. Perhaps a new academic subdiscipline might be in order: Anyone for Boredom Studies?
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-226-76853-8
Page Count: 289
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
For diehards who want to know more about Prince Charles and the love of his life—who is definitely not Princess Di—British journalist Wilson redigests 20 years of royal gossip. British expository style makes this different from American rehashes, and there is a decidedly exotic quality to the subject matter. To read about Charles's affair with Camilla Parker Bowles is to read about a tribe at least as strange and anachronistic as the Yanomami of Brazil and the Amish of Pennsylvania. Wilson (ghostwriter of James Whitaker's Diana v. Charles, not reviewed) gives a tour of the customs of blue-blooded Britons, of a world in which a prince could conduct an affair with a woman whose public school was decorated with the stuffed body of a ``crucified'' bat, and who is married to someone formerly called the ``Silver Stick in Waiting'' to the Queen. The sex may be old, but the anthropology is riveting: the royal calendar, the London season, the rituals around mating and breeding, the aristocratic pastimes of polo and fox hunting, and the household courtiers and guards who still dress in the same costumes, so Camilla's father observes, they once wore to fight Napoleon. And where the Prince of Wales apparently spends his days and nights preparing to be King of England and thinking about Camilla Parker Bowles's knickers (a transcript of the famous Camillagate tape is included). When the world watched Diana Spencer walk down the aisle of St. Paul's—yes, even then—Charles and Camilla had just shared what they claimed would be their last tryst. Diana gets little sympathy: Though often on moral high ground, she is a neurotic ``bag of bones.'' Camilla, with her ``voluptuous curves,'' is devoted and discreet, a ``woman who cares deeply for her man''—the Tammy Wynette of the Beaufort hunt club. Less interesting are arguments about whether the monarchy will stand. More than anyone cares to know about the prince's sex life. But as a scandalizing glimpse into a closed society, it's rather fascinating.
Pub Date: Nov. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-13808-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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