An insightful, thought-provoking probe into the impulses of sexual desire.
A collection of musings on actress Matthews’ sexual history, including several incidents of abuse as a child—as told to and arranged by critic Shields (How Literature Saved My Life, 2013, etc.).
Originally conceived as a documentary about Matthews’ side job as an English dubber of Italian pornography, the project developed into a much more revealing examination of her feelings about desire, sex, and love. Corresponding with Shields, her cousin once removed, Matthews reveals the extent to which the repeated sexual trauma she suffered as a child has affected her life. Matthews refers to her trauma as the experience that “formatted” her; all subsequent experiences have been interpreted or refracted by her abuse. Shields, too, notes in his introduction that the project’s focus shifted to whether or not one important question could be answered: “How and to what degree is it possible to get beyond early trauma?” However, the psychological trauma experienced by Matthews as a child was not limited to sexual abuse. She also delves into the complex relationship she has with her mother, whose Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, along with her drinking problem, instilled in her paranoid and guilty thoughts about sex and pleasure. As Matthews digs deeper into her reflections on past lovers and relationships, she has a startling knack for self-analysis, describing her continual need to be the object of desire as well as the many instances that lead to her “intimacy-junkie” diagnosis. Behind Matthews’ conclusion that she lacks ownership of her body is Shields. Like Freud’s case studies, Shields acts as a gatekeeper of Matthews’ life, shaping the details of her experiences into his interpretation of her narrative. In this way, their collaboration is further complicated and creates a dramatic entanglement that goes far beyond the therapist-session quality of Matthews’ monologue.
An insightful, thought-provoking probe into the impulses of sexual desire.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940450-64-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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