Not nearly as explicit as one would expect from a horny single guy on the make—instead, a tastefully amusing roll in the hay.
A perpetually single British journalist in his late 30s logs on to assess the state of online dating.
Thomas starts by reporting that he finally found the nerve to pop the question to his longtime girlfriend, on a rooftop no less. But he hadn’t always been so lucky in love. Two years earlier, commissioned by Men’s Health to analyze Internet matchmaking, he skeptically got online—and why not, it worked wonders for his newly married half brother. Scanning the dizzying array of matchmaking services, two stood out: one boasting 4.5 million subscribers, the other offering the widest variety of U.K. singles. Thomas impatiently stops and starts his search numerous times, frustrated at the lack of responses despite being “witty and offhand and self-deprecating and carefully calibrated to appeal”—and using a profile photo of himself with Mick Jagger. A long parade of unsuitable gals marches through his life. “Bongowoman” is nice but too tall, “Lizziegirl” swiftly loses interest, “Kate” helps him overcome an aversion to anal sex, but enjoys it too much, “Chinalady5” becomes an obsessed stalker—alas, no one possesses the “tumescence” the author seeks. Scattered about are revelations on subjects as varied as the profiles he peruses. Thomas reflects on his boyhood crushes, orgasms, heartbreak, crabs, kink, wild nights in Bangkok and Russia, the “profound promiscuity” of his “shagging years.” Along the way, he develops a compulsion for online porn, and then begins to seriously question his commitment potential after a year of online dating. He offers sage tips on how to maximize (and not become disgruntled by) the experience, shares a few messy pregnancy scares and comes full circle with a wedding announcement after finally striking gold.
Not nearly as explicit as one would expect from a horny single guy on the make—instead, a tastefully amusing roll in the hay.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-306-81548-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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