Making Love: an Erotic Odyssey

A frank look at the act of making love describes one man's personal experience of sex and physical love, attempting to understand how those experiences shaped his life. By the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 30,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

"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.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pulitzer-winner Rhodes, apparently galvanized by the overwhelming emotional response to his account of his abused childhood in A Hole in the World (1990), pushes still deeper into forbidden territory with this frank exploration of how he learned to heal his wounds, largely unconsciously, through sex. The result is a sexual autobiography that intentionally and methodically breaks most of the bounds of literary propriety--and that will leave many loyal readers breathless. ``Sex is a sovereignty waiting to be explored, just as consciousness was for early modern fiction,'' writes Rhodes. The manner in which he delves into the purpose and meaning underlying his own sexual history is reminiscent of such fiction in its intensity, diligence, and ambition. Tracing the ways in which the physical abuse he experienced in childhood may have led to and probably demanded the working out of certain sexual fixations (most involving the excruciating and exquisite postponement of gratification), Rhodes introduces readers to early homoerotic fumblings with affection-starved classmates at the school for boys he attended; his loss of his virginity with a New York prostitute at age 18; and an expansive gallery of real-life lovers, porn-film companions, disillusioned ex-wives, and, now, in his middle age, a devoted, similarly wounded, and equally creative female lover. Readers will be surprised at Rhodes's extreme frankness--he appears to revel in descriptions of favorite scenes from his pornographic video collection; of his rigorous daily masturbation routine; of his fascination with extended orgasm; and of the ways in which he has brought some of his lovers to a peak of erotic fulfillment. But his purpose here is clearly not to exploit or to titillate; Rhodes is simply cutting to the quick in his uniquely incisive, courageous, and aesthetically gratifying manner. A stunning act of self-revelation, bound to create a stir. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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 Reed Business Information, Inc.