Making Love

August 31, 1992
``I'm talking about the part of relationships no one ever talks about,'' asserts the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb --and the ghostwriter of two sex manuals--near the beginning of this detailed erotic history. By the end, readers may support that conventional reticence: the twice-married author (``I've slept with 11 women . . . five of them only once'') concludes with a relentlessly observed record of the sex enjoyed--and not--with his current long-term lover, identified as G---; he goes so far as to note changes in the color of her genitals. More engaging are Rhodes's recollections of his sexual coming-of-age, from his earliest autoerotic experiences through those (both solitary and with a boy) at the farm school where he spent most of his youth, to his losing his virginity with a prostitute while a freshman at Yale. His connecting of favored sexual fantasies and marathon masturbating sessions with circumstances of his childhood is intelligent and convincing. Rhodes finally acknowledges, with G---'s help, that his desire to arouse her to multiple orgasms had more to do with exercising power than with making love.

July 1, 1992
Following A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood ( LJ 9/1/90), Rhodes offers a remarkably frank case study of the most intimate personal experiences: his own sexual life. Opening with losing his virginity, he chronicles his first sexual experience, masturbation techniques, fantasies, use of pornography, and his work with ESO (extended sexual orgasm) and ends with his relationship with G--. Emphasizing the "verity" of everything in the book, Rhodes offers explicit descriptions that may titillate some readers and shock others. This well-written, if sometimes self-indulgent, volume provocatively and perceptively provides one perspective on male heterosexuality. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/92.--James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.