A frank, self-aware, provocatively voyeuristic narrative spanning the politics of the body, inside and out.
A noted Peruvian author’s compelling assortment of essays on female sexuality, gender, and the wonders of the human body.
In her first book-length work to be translated into English, Wiener, the former editor of the Spanish version of Marie Claire, assembles a series of writings that are keenly representative of her perspectives on sexuality. She also relates anecdotes from her curious journalistic wanderings and her “unfaithful” life. Some of her tales include a fascinating profile of a boastful Peruvian sex guru and his harem of six wives, an undercover visit to a Lima prison to survey jail tattoo culture, and an intimately and vividly described evening at a Barcelona swingers’ club with her husband in tow to enjoy erotic delights from the “alchemists of sex.” Elsewhere, Wiener participates in a dominatrix demonstration and an ayahuasca ceremony, and she discusses the legacy of Chilean author Isabel Allende (“famous enough to be on a par with the likes of Stephen King, Gabriel García Márquez, and J. K. Rowling”). In a brief though engaging piece demonstrating Wiener’s dry humor, wit, and immersive sense of journalism, she investigates the myths and complexities of female ejaculation. Later, she turns her gaze inward to address the dynamics of her current polyamorous relationship with a man and a woman while wholly admitting, “I never got the knack of fidelity.” The author’s voice is passionate, authoritative, and pensive, and her tantalizing tour of the taboo and the risqué becomes an addictive pleasure as the book progresses. Her perspectives are both illuminating and educative as she instructs readers to contemplate issues such as sexuality, gender politics, and social injustice as well as how motherhood has the potential to change how a woman perceives the bigger picture. In a particularly warm, memorable story, Wiener describes how her daughter refused to sleep on her own, causing the sleep-deprived author to contort herself into a kid-sized bed.
A frank, self-aware, provocatively voyeuristic narrative spanning the politics of the body, inside and out.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63206-159-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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