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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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