Página InicialGruposDiscussãoMaisZeitgeist
Pesquisar O Sítio Web
Este sítio web usa «cookies» para fornecer os seus serviços, para melhorar o desempenho, para analítica e (se não estiver autenticado) para publicidade. Ao usar o LibraryThing está a reconhecer que leu e compreende os nossos Termos de Serviço e Política de Privacidade. A sua utilização deste sítio e serviços está sujeita a essas políticas e termos.

Resultados dos Livros Google

Carregue numa fotografia para ir para os Livros Google.

A carregar...

Who Wrote the Book of Love?

por Lee Siegel

MembrosCríticasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
281833,214 (3)1
Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex--beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.… (mais)
Nenhum(a)
A carregar...

Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro.

Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.

» Ver também 1 menção

Who Wrote the Book of Love? coyly straddles the line between memoir and novel. Author Lee Siegel admits in a prefatory note regarding his book's protagonist Lee Siegel that "so many of our experiences are ... identical," but there are parts of this book that are certainly fictional. I was so entertained by Siegel's account of the volume In the Beginning: A Child's Book about Grown-up Love by Dr. Isaiah Miller, that I mentioned it to my Other Reader, thinking that it must be real. But she quickly used the 'net to demonstrate that the only traceable references to it originated in Siegel's book! I maintain, though, that my confusion was understandable, given the many references to actual culture and events of the 1950s that fill this book.

The structure of the book also belies a certain measure of artifice if not invention, in that it has five chapters (corresponding to the five chapters in the lyric of "Who Wrote the Book of Love" by the Monotones, as well as the five chapters of Miller's In the Beginning), each divided into two years, and thus perfectly spanning the integral decade of baby-boomer childhood.

Siegel's childhood takes place in a well-off Jewish enclave in Beverly Hills. His father is a physician and his mother is an actress, and he attends the curiously-named Ponce De Leon Elementary School until delivered to Beverly Hills High School in "Chapter Five, She Loves You, and All Your Dreams Come True." The confessions of a childhood quest for love and/or sex are complicated only slightly by Cold War paranoia and the vagaries of US mass culture. Siegel and his cigarette-smoking pals tutor each other ignorantly through puberty, the reader is introduced to each of the girls in the series of his infatuations, and the story culminates in the exposure of the erotic origins of his cacoethes scribendi.

I've previously read one other of Siegel's novels (Love in a Dead Language) and one volume of his scholarship (Net of Magic), and he has yet to disappoint.
3 vote paradoxosalpha | Nov 20, 2016 |
sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Tem de autenticar-se para poder editar dados do Conhecimento Comum.
Para mais ajuda veja a página de ajuda do Conhecimento Comum.
Título canónico
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Data da publicação original
Pessoas/Personagens
Locais importantes
Acontecimentos importantes
Filmes relacionados
Epígrafe
Dedicatória
Primeiras palavras
Citações
Últimas palavras
Nota de desambiguação
Editores da Editora
Autores de citações elogiosas (normalmente na contracapa do livro)
Língua original
DDC/MDS canónico
LCC Canónico

Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.

Wikipédia em inglês (1)

Who Wrote the Book of Love? is acclaimed novelist Lee Siegel's comedic chronicle of the sexual life of an American boy in Southern California in the 1950s. Starting at the beginning of the decade, in the year that Stalin announced that the Soviet Union had developed an atomic bomb, the book opens with a child's first memory of himself. Closing at the end of the decade, when Pat Boone's guide to dating, 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty, topped the bestseller list, the book culminates just moments before the boy experiences for the first time what he had learned from a book read to him by his mother was called "coitus or sexual intercourse or sometimes, less formally, just making love." Between the initial overwhelmingly erotic recollection and the final climactic moment, all is sex--beguiling and intractable, naughty and sweet. Who Wrote the Book of Love? is about the subversive sexual imaginations of children. And, as such, it is about the origins of love. Vignettes from the author's childhood provide the material for the construction of what is at once comic fiction, imaginative historical reportage, and an ironically nostalgic confession. The book evokes the tone and tempo of a decade during which America was blatantly happy, wholesome, and confident, and yet, at the same time, deeply fearful of communism and nuclear holocaust. Siegel recounts both the cheer and the paranoia of the period and the ways in which those sentiments informed wondering about sex and falling in love. "Part of my plan," Mark Twain wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, "has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked." With the same motive, Lee Siegel has written what Twain might have composed had he been Jewish, raised in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, and joyously obsessed with sex and love.

Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas.

Descrição do livro
Resumo Haiku

Current Discussions

Nenhum(a)

Capas populares

Ligações Rápidas

Avaliação

Média: (3)
0.5
1
1.5
2 1
2.5
3 1
3.5
4 1
4.5
5

É você?

Torne-se num Autor LibraryThing.

 

Acerca | Contacto | LibraryThing.com | Privacidade/Termos | Ajuda/Perguntas Frequentes | Blogue | Loja | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas Legadas | Primeiros Críticos | Conhecimento Comum | 203,191,434 livros! | Barra de topo: Sempre visível