Funny, intriguing personal accounts of the kinkier side of sex.
Whether readers are into bondage, submission, people dressed up in furry animal costumes or just vanilla sex, the four-year research project undertaken by Aussie Clifford-Smith (A Marvellous Party: The Life of Bernard King, 2004) will evoke pleasure. Interested in the dirty details of the goings-on in other people’s bedrooms, the author placed an ad in a newspaper, trolled Internet fetish chat rooms and attended swinger parties to learn more about what drove people to their personal kinks and how it took shape in their lives. Each chapter introduces a new person and their kink, with the author providing space for them to explain the intricacies of their urges. Fleshing out each anecdote are Clifford-Smith’s own thoughts, sometimes heightened by comparisons to artwork or great novels or injected with humorous asides or statistics. The author, a self-proclaimed vanilla-sex enthusiast, was unable to remain entirely on the sidelines, and was eventually pulled into the action by one of her subjects. "That was undoubtedly the biggest surprise of them all and, while it was useful, I'm glad it didn't last," she writes. Prostitution, bestiality, water sports, scat play, amputees—it’s all here. Clifford-Smith’s first-person observations, blended with the subjects’ various sexual proclivities, results in an intriguing collection of kinks. Beware though—even the author confides, “Who was I kidding when I thought I was unshockable?” Not for the faint of heart, but certainly the inquisitive mind—or libido.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781741759129
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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