A hip, humorous confessional written with maturity, panache and sex-positive vibes.
The dream nuptials of a bride-to-be become complicated by a fiance with a penchant for porn.
With great relief, Internet blogger Southwood writes of formally consummating a three-year long-distance relationship by relocating from Vancouver to her boyfriend Robbie’s place in Los Angeles and getting engaged. A restless gal of 28 who’s happy to divulge her sexual repertoire of only “twelve guys and one girl,” this move would be her tenth so far—and hopefully her last. Just days before Southwood’s departure, Robbie, a Hollywood cameraman big on expressive feelings, drops the bombshell that he’s been offered a prized cinematography position with a “reality TV porn” program. Flabbergasted and ambivalent, Southwood agonized over her reaction: Would her latent sexual prudishness spoil their relationship and hijack the wedding, or should she just process the information and deal with it? Their situation worsened before it resolved, and throughout, the author shrewdly ruminates on relationship pitfalls. Southwood’s contemporary analysis revolves around the “ownership” credo of monogamy; these days, she asks, “exactly how much of our significant other’s body and soul do we get?” However, as Robbie’s livelihood put unwanted pressure on their sex life yet concurrently provided a surfeit of hilariously awkward predicaments, the author pauses to shrewdly comment on the male-dominated world of pornography, its effect on early sexual development and infidelity, alongside an explicit cornucopia of porn varieties, sexual positions, terms and conditions, compliments of Robbie’s new job. The main theme running through Southwood’s memoir, however, is not how soul-sucking and unapologetically raunchy the sex industry can be labeled by outsiders, but how much open and unfettered communication is required when one-half of a partnership becomes threatened by the other’s involvement in it.
A hip, humorous confessional written with maturity, panache and sex-positive vibes.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-58005-498-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
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
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