Burning Desires: Sex in America: A Report from the Field - Hardcover

Chapple, Steve

4.4

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780385244121: Burning Desires: Sex in America: A Report from the Field

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385244126 ISBN 13: 9780385244121

Publisher: Doubleday, 1989

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

An anecdotal description of a great variety of sexual behavior, participants, and censors. No bibliography. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly:

For all the promise and scope of its title, this field study is only modestly revealing. Examining the effect of AIDS on the sexual mores of the nation, the authors--Chapple is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle , Talbot an editor of Image magazine--start off in Minneapolis following a doctor who brought the news of AIDS to local heterosexual swingers clubs. They finish in San Francisco at the "World's First Jack- and Jill-off Party," a scene that provides the book's gamiest reading. They cover a lot of other territory as well, much only remotely related to current sexual practices. Traveling in time, they report on Greek and Roman excesses and reiterate an oft-chronicled list of U.S. presidential peccadilloes. Researching cross-country, they visit fabled party spots, such as Key West and Aspen, where witnesses of the sexual revolution's first stirrings in the '60s attest to the detumescent realities of sexuality in the late '80s. Checking in on feminist writers, including Germaine Greer and Shere Hite, they move on to producers of feminist pornography (not necessarily an oxymoron). The first-person-plural "we" of their account is sometimes societally universal and other times cozily specific to their state (of comfort or discomfort) at the moment, and in the end their report is readable more for its chatty, unclinical and often wide-eyed tone than for its content. First serial to Playboy.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Picking up where Gay Talese left off in Thy Neighbor's Wife (LJ 6/15/80), these New Journalists look at what's happened to the sexual revolution in the 1980s. From Washington, D.C., to San Francisco via Key West, Aspen, and Chico, California, the voyeuristic authors (continually asserting their heterosexuality) take us on a wide-ranging tour of sexual America that includes Anne Rice of homoerotic Vampire novels, Andrea Dworkin, Arturo Cruz Jr., Germaine Greer, Shere Hite, Tipper Gore's anti-rock campaign, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's handling of the AIDS crisis, the men's movement, phone sex, the Mitchell Brothers porno filmmakers, and more. Despite an occasional error, the well-researched writing is fresh, witty, graphic, and informative. Excerpted in four consecutive issues of Playboy , April-July.
- James E. Van Buskirk, Acad. of Art Coll. Lib., San Francisco
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.