An unconventional and strikingly lyrical observation of women and their desire to speak regarding the fulfillment of their...
A revealing look at postmodern feminism and its role in female desire through one woman’s personal anecdotes, meditations and professional research.
Angel provides an intelligent examination of how today’s women satiate their needs and desires. The author examines her own sexual experiences as both a writer and a lover, from her teen years to the present, in poetic yet fragmented theories revolving around the feminist icons Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. This is not to say that her philosophy leans toward the bias of these women; rather, she uses their thoughts as examples and builds on them to answer an important question that many women face in some form or another: “What is it to define, or even to know, our desires—to identify which are our own, and which result from a kind of porousness?” The definition of this identification of desire within oneself, the desire for women to be able to freely speak up about what they really want and how they want it is answered through Angel’s own emotional bonding to the modern woman’s intuitive feelings of shame, beauty, and confusion of sex or lust for love. Throughout the book, structured as a numbered series of vignettes, short paragraphs and even single sentences, the author struggles with her personal convictions regarding love and lust in and out of the bedroom. However, she staunchly maintains her theory with an empowering conclusion that begs for women to speak up above the commercialized version of sex and the woman’s perceived notion of what it takes to fulfill their desires. “The desire to speak is a desire to burst through silence, to puncture,” she writes. “As such, it is also erotic; it contains its own excitement. Speaking undoes the perceived straitjacketing. Unlaces the corset, winds down the hair.”
An unconventional and strikingly lyrical observation of women and their desire to speak regarding the fulfillment of their sexual and emotional needs.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-28040-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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