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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 11, 2008)
Winter Reading generally formal and distant, creating a distinct break between the classy professor she is now and the punk rock teenager she was back then. She removes herself from her own experiences to cast a detached, analytical eye on her past, stumbling on the occasional cuss word to distinguish the “rebelliousness” of her youth. Though not incredibly thought- provoking, the tales of teenage rebellion, desire for individuality and fl uctuating experimental phases are easy to relate to for girls and boys alike. The real fun of the memoir comes from laughing at Greenlaw as well as yourself. Young audiences can identify with the silly adolescent mentality as they are living it, while older audiences can chuckle about the rashness of their youth with a hint of pride, as Greenlaw does. And if you really want to make the most of the novel, you can always read it with a British accent. — Mariam Wahed Blood and Shit The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22. he Two Kinds of Decay recounts poet Sarah Manguso’s struggle with chronic idiopathic demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP), a disease T that doesn’t even have a proper name yet. But Manguso won’t be inhabiting a weepy-eyed pity city in her fi rst published memoir. “With my own blood in me,” Manguso explains in her steady, refl ective, matter- of-fact tone, “I couldn’t feel, and I couldn’t move, but with other people’s blood in me, and with chemicals in me, I could do those things.” Gulp. For needle-phobes and psychosomatic sufferers (myself included), Decay may induce feelings of lightheadedness. What’s great about Manguso’s memoir is that it doesn’t have a grand narrative arc welded to its spine. Manguso begins her book with such a simple premise: “Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember.” Who hasn’t felt the urge to record momentous events after they happen in the hopes that, in less chaotic times, these idiosyncratic thoughts might offer some insight? But what insight Manguso gleans from her ordeal isn’t set in stone from page one; instead she picks away at her memories using sharp, poetic prose and neat, chewable paragraphs as bits and pieces of her past come into focus on the page. Eventually she unearths nuggets like “The only hard thing I’d done in my life was recovering from a disease,” but usually her revelations are sweeter, like her belief that having sex with her college friend was what led to the disease’s remission. Congratulations, Sarah Manguso, for writing the fi rst memoir that made me sweat. A lot. — Chuck Adams Getting It On for Science Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach. W.W. Norton, $24.95. irst, it was dead bodies. Next, the scientifi c possibility of the soul. Now, it’s sex: sex research, to be more precise. Give Mary Roach a couple more decades, and she’ll have turned out tomes on every outside-the-norm aspect of science you can think of, and a few more for good measure. Her personable, conversational, wry tone — and her willingness to join in the studies when human subjects board guidelines keep her from observing others in certain, er, acts — make Roach a fantastic guide through the world of sex research, from John B. Watson, the fi rst “to make the case for bringing sexual arousal and orgasm into the formal confi nes of a laboratory,” to Dr. Ahmed Shafi k, a somewhat quirky fellow who studies things like “the effect of polyester on sexual activity.” (This involved rats in small pairs of pants.) Naturally, F the more familiar names, like Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, make plenty of appearances as well. Roach starts with the basics — what actually happens during sex, and how researchers fi gured that out — and moves on to less straightforward topics, like the health benefi ts of masturbation (and whether an inexpensive, non-prescription vibrator can do the job just as well as the spendy Eros Clitoral Therapy Device), and how paraplegics can have orgasms. Roach’s footnotes and asides are as funny, and as sharply observed, as her main text, but she never loses sight of the more diffi cult aspects of her chosen topic, particularly where human hearts, as well as human bodies, are involved. — Molly Templeton Notes From An Overanalytical Journalist Only Love Can Break Your Heart by David Samuels. The New Press, $26.95. avid Samuels begins this collection of journalistic and personal essays with a preface that proclaims “it has become harder and harder for freelancers like me to have any fun” before announcing his retirement D GIVE the LOVE! Hats, socks, & gloves! 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