A provocative and entrancing autobiography that’s both titillating and authentic.
A debut memoir chronicles the sexual coming-of-age of an early-21st-century playboy.
In his book, the author uses the pseudonym A Young Don Juan in order “to make my story universal” and to intensively explore the impact that sex had on his youth. After a cerebral introduction, the fun begins as Don Juan smoothly moves into the details of his childhood “pre-erection days” with first crushes and female acts of coddling that translated into a “Freudian sense of sex” for him. An adolescent of divorced parents, the author satisfied his voyeuristic urges by spying on his aunt undressing and perusing Playboy magazines. But when it came time to make contact with the opposite sex, pessimism about his looks dampened any enthusiasm. Eventually, Don Juan’s outlook changed by age 15 when a girl named Christine captivated him and then broke his heart. After losing his virginity in a massage parlor, he felt his testosterone surge, and his college years found him searching “for connection through sex like a dog looking for companionship in the trees he marks.” Traveling abroad opened his eyes to enthralling cultures where desire was openly expressed. During these trips, the author formed his own impressions about the people, places, and cultural differences he encountered as well as reflecting on the nature of human desire, the complexities of liaisons with married women, and the raw power of an “over-ripe libido.” At 18, Don Juan was told by a sexually satisfied nanny that he “had the makings of becoming a great lover,” a confidence booster that led to further erotic dalliances, from Manhattan to Paris to Thailand. Love temporarily broke up the libidinous episodes, but he soon rebounded with riskier sexual escapades in places like bathroom stalls and apartment stoops. The author’s writing is regal, intelligent, social media contemporary, and provocative without becoming raunchy. Still, the prose can sometimes be too precious and gilded for the raw extremes of the subject matter, which eventually runs out of steam. But not before Don Juan recounts that he finally realized it was “time to grow up” and his intriguing ruminations turn inward toward the spiritual and mystical. Readers who enjoy erotic accounts written from a unique, cleverly intuitive perspective and spiced with a pungent, feverish hedonism will be pleased to discover the heady material blossoming in the pages of this candid memoir.
A provocative and entrancing autobiography that’s both titillating and authentic.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8548-2
Page Count: 214
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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