A unique, voyeuristic expose of a taboo bedroom counterculture.
Los Angeles screenwriter Stern penetrates the unconventional world of swinging.
Aiming to educate readers on an exclusive community he’s made a large part of his own life, Stern starts at the beginning, where, as a youth, his carnal education was awkwardly stunted by anxiety and hair-trigger orgasms. In desperate need of “sexual batting practice,” he embarked on a mission to shed his naïveté (and abandon monogamy altogether) through hookup websites, the Craigslist “crapshoot” and an immense amount of social networking with swinging couples looking for spicy interactions. The bounty of his titillating exploratory research into “the Lifestyle” forms the foundation of the book’s 13 lessons/chapters featuring explicitly graphic, casual sexual encounters and erotic arrangements. These include Stern’s first (disastrous) group-sex experience, which ended with a ceiling fan hitting him in the forehead. Most of these threesome sexcapades are carefully predetermined and, to Stern, gloriously NSA (no strings attached), which are just a few of the many benefits the author touts about this highly promiscuous subculture. Stern’s prose is appropriately authoritative and spares no carnal detail; he wants the reader to reap the benefits of his years of experience. For the curious, the author includes sections on varying scenarios like the hard versus soft swapping of partners and a thoughtful list of must-have items for the neophyte. Elsewhere, he explains the types of couples most encountered and the social etiquette required at play parties. With revealing material similar to Suzy Spencer’s Secret Sex Lives (2012), Stern still rejects the notion that his book technically violates the swinging community’s strict “code of discretion,” and he further implores readers to get out and explore the multifaceted pleasures of an alternative lifestyle tailored to “the right people with the right reasons with the right attitude.”
A unique, voyeuristic expose of a taboo bedroom counterculture.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3253-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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