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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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