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THE BOOK OF HOT

A MANIFESTO

An entertaining and educational firsthand account of an older woman’s single sexual life.

The pseudonymous Mrs. Hot offers a guide to women nearing 60 who are currently in—or planning to join—the dating scene, featuring accounts of her personal experiences and tips on beauty and self-confidence.

Following her divorce, the debut author was a single mother who spent two decades in voluntary celibacy. But after her son left home, she felt it was time for a change. In her late 50s, she opted to transform into a person she called “Mrs. Hot” and start dating again. In this first book of a planned duology, she details her various life changes, from leaving her unnamed “highly stressful public service job from hell” to getting cosmetic surgery, including Botox treatment. She also took up dieting and exercise, mainly because she wanted a “smokin’ hot body” to attract men. She offers her readers numerous tips, including on how to choose the right perfume, adopt good posture, and radiate confidence in order to feel, think, act, and be sexy. Her specific advice on dating, meanwhile, focuses primarily on the online variety. Along the way, Mrs. Hot warns of potential scammers—including men who have no intention of having any interactions beyond the virtual—and provides a bevy of suggestions for stimulating sexting. Later, she shares some of her own escapades in the post-50 dating world. They include dates with men of various ages; some were selfless lovers, she says, while others were complete misfires, such as one man who seemed more interested in a movie than he was in Mrs. Hot. This work will likely be encouraging to women who share the author’s age and relationship status. Although Mrs. Hot does promote the benefits of physical beauty, she also maintains that true attractiveness comes from within; throughout the book, she encourages women to release their “Inner Goddess.” She also highlights the power of positive thinking and the importance of loving oneself. She does, however, seem to contradict herself when she says that those who are obese and happy “are simply rationalizing their way to eating whatever they want.” Mrs. Hot’s prose is concise, with many instances of clever wordplay, particularly in chapter subtitles, such as “Taking Delivery of the U.S. Male” or “I Experience Getting Lust in the Stacks.” Indeed, her accounts of sexual encounters are similarly more playful than they are erotic. For instance, she writes that a 27-year-old “nice Italian boy” named Daniele “gave me a full, passionate serving of his native tongue—and I don’t mean a lesson in Italian.” The erotic tales in this book eschew BDSM (“It’s Fifty Shades of Nay, in my opinion”) and occur in places that some readers may feel are sex-fantasy clichés (such as a plane, a movie theater, and a beach). Nevertheless, the author’s dating stories, while a mixed bag, are often delightful—and on more than one occasion, she intriguingly tells of deepening feelings (love, perhaps?) for a man she was seeing.

An entertaining and educational firsthand account of an older woman’s single sexual life.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9912051-9-6

Page Count: 364

Publisher: Written Warrior Press

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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