A sensitive, intimate and bold story.
A 40-something journalist’s account of her yearlong open-marriage experiment and its consequences.
Rinaldi loved her husband, Scott. Though not especially demonstrative, he was stable, kind and had always been there for her. But he had also made it clear that he had no wish to have children and got a vasectomy. With no hope of creating a family and hungry to experience the passion that was missing from her marriage, the author embarked on what she and Scott would jokingly dub the “Wild Oats Project”: an open marriage that would permit both to see others outside of their immediate social circle. From the start, “good girl” Rinaldi broke rules and slept with someone both she and Scott knew. After that, she began consulting with seduction experts schooled in the ways of “pleasure, flirtation, sensuality and abundance,” advertising for short-term partners on hookup websites and trying out one-night stands with hot young strangers half her age. Her journey eventually led her to OneTouch, an “urban commune” dedicated to the open exploration of desire. There, she met, and slept with, other seekers of sexual wisdom, including one woman with whom she had a lesbian fling and another with whom she had a “girl on girl on boy” threesome. Toward the end of her “project,” Rinaldi unexpectedly heard from one of her short-term partners, a man with whom she had fallen in love and who had fallen in love with her. Now fully able to see the limitations in her marriage, she chose to take a chance with her former lover and accept the consequences, both positive and negative. Never apologizing for her actions, the author writes that her project was something that her “soul drove [her] to do,” a difficult challenge she could refuse only with the risk of losing the personal enlightenment she was seeking all along.
A sensitive, intimate and bold story.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-29021-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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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