In this sparkling collection of nineteen stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from some of our most public controversies. A man finds God and finally wants to father a child-only his wife is now forty-two years old. A coach's son discovers his sexuality on the football field. A roommate's bizarre secret liberates a repressed young woman. From the unforeseen consequences of a polite social lie to the turmoil caused by the hair on a woman's chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn. Many of these stories involve animals and what they mean to us, or babies and whether to have them; some replay biblical plots in modern contexts. With characters old, young, straight, gay, and simply confused, Donoghue dazzles with her range and her ability to touch lightly but delve deeply into the human condition.
In this sparkling collection of 19 stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from public controversies.
Full of quirky characters that populate a profession most of us know little about, Touchy Subjects is a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of those who make their living touching others. In this tell-all memoir, Steve Capellini, author of Massage for Dummies and other mainstream massage titles, yanks the draping sheet aside and comes clean about the temptations and transgressions that have marked his own career. Then he embarks upon a far-flung adventure seeking the true meaning of human touch.From a Madison Avenue boardroom to a gross anatomy lab; from the deck of a private yacht to a seedy Asian massage parlor, the author uncovers stories that others haven't told: sex stories, prostitution stories, adultery stories and stories about a modern massage slave trade that ensnares hundreds of thousands of young women, many of them in the U.S., some of them working right in your home town.The author tangles with a Trinidadian rapist, a nymphomaniac ex-Playboy bunny, an impotent sea captain and an overweight multimillionaire ukulele player. Through each of these stories, he gradually guides the reader toward the underlying Truth of massage, debunking myths along the way and getting to the heart of what it's all about-touching people. The stories are interspersed with cutting-edge research on the science of touch, evolutionary biology and the grooming habits of some of our closet primate relatives, the bonobos.The author's quest to get to the bottom of touch takes him to a clothing optional hot springs resort in Northern California, a meditation retreat in the Virgin Islands, an ashram in the Berkshire mountains, behind the wheel of a Maserati on the back roads of Arizona and finally to Kathmandu Nepal where he meets a man who has risked everything-his health, his money and years of his life-on a quixotic mission to train "untouchables" to become massage therapists. It is there, among some of the world's most impoverished and oppressed people, that the true meaning of massage is revealed.Doing massage is a profession unlike any other, filled with flamboyant practitioners of all stripes. Touchy Subjects features them all, in a circus side show of chapters such as Nudity, Impotence, Adultery, Homosexuality, Cellulite and Disney World. Throughout each passage, Capellini seeks to answer important questions: Is it possible to touch dead people? What's it like to massage a horny guru? And what percentage of women have seduced their masseurs? Hint: it's high. This is a raucous, irreverent, insightful and, in the end, touching story about what it means to touch people, from someone who has, quite literally, touched thousands.
"In the United States, sex education is more than just an uncomfortable rite of passage, it's an amorphous curriculum that varies widely based on the politics, experience, resources, and biases of the people teaching it. Most often, it's a train wreck, overemphasizing or underemphasizing STIs, teen pregnancy, abstinence, and consent. In Touchy Subject, philosopher Lauren Bialystok and historian Lisa M. F. Andersen make the case for thoughtful sex education, explaining why it's worth fighting for and which kind most deserves our fight, despite all the inconveniences and compromises along the way. They argue that democratic and humanistic aims can be used to provide the tools to reason about the content and form of sex education. In practice, this amounts to a curriculum that meets what are currently considered highly comprehensive standards, incorporates ethics and civics education, and substantially modifies some aspects of teacher training and school design; it also assigns different responsibilities to different actors inside and outside schools, and it responds to the salient features of young people's evolving worlds, including the inequities that put some students at much higher risk of sexual harm than others. Throughout their inquiry, the authors show the reader how sex education has progressed and how the very concept of "progress" remains contestable"--
Real Help for the Toughest Talks Most parents dread talking about sex with their children. Anne Marie Miller loves giving "the talk." As she has shared her personal story and talked about God's gift of sex with almost half a million young people, she's noticed some disturbing patterns: · Google is how kids learn about sex · Kids are learning about sex and viewing pornography earlier than parents think · The sexually abused often don't tell anyone for fear of getting in trouble · Sexual messages are being consumed daily through mainstream and social media · Most parents think their child is the exception Instead of sweeping this topic under the rug, Miller wants to change the narrative. In this immensely practical and well-researched book, she equips parents to have meaningful and age-appropriate conversations with their children about sex, pornography, and sexual abuse. She advises parents on how to keep the lines of communication open so that their children know they can trust them with their fears, struggles, and mistakes. Most important, she offers hope to worried parents that their children can grow up with a healthy biblical view of sex as a gift from God.
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.
Finding answers to questions like the nature of God, his sovereign control in life, evil, and suffering, is what makes up a person's worldview. In this book, where faith is seeking understanding, these and other subjects are probed with care, sensitivity, and faithfulness to the truth of Scripture. David F. Wells, Distinguished Research Professor, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
A New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize Winner of the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism Named a best book of the year by: the Los Angeles Times the San Francisco Chronicle the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch the Chicago Tribune the Seattle Times "A stunning look at a problem that has dire consequences for our country.”-New York Post The dramatic story of Methamphetamine as it comes to the American Heartland-a timely, moving, account of one community's attempt to confront the epidemic and see their way to a brighter future. Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland is the story of the drug as it infiltrates the community of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), a once-thriving farming and railroad community. Tracing the connections between the lives touched by meth and the global forces that have set the stage for the epidemic, Methland offers a vital and unique perspective on a pressing contemporary tragedy. Oelwein, Iowa is like thousand of other small towns across the county. It has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy and an out-migration of people. If this wasn't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, long-lasting, and highly addictive drug has come to town, touching virtually everyone's lives. Journalist Nick Reding reported this story over a period of four years, and he brings us into the heart of the town through an ensemble cast of intimately drawn characters, including: Clay Hallburg, the town doctor, who fights meth even as he struggles with his own alcoholism; Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose case load is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime, and Jeff Rohrick, who is still trying to kick a meth habit after four years. Methland is a portrait of a community under siege, of the lives the drug has devastated, and of the heroes who continue to fight the war. It will appeal to readers of David Sheff's bestselling Beautiful Boy, and serve as inspiration for those who believe in the power of everyday people to change their world for the better.
