Bøger af Katie Roiphe

Last Night in Paradise is an eye-opening look at an age in which sexual liberation and one-night stands have been replaced by caution and fear. In the tradition of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Roiphe blends autobiography and cultural criticism to give us a vivid portrait of the sexual puritanism sweeping the nation. She also captures the shadowy sense of unease that lies behind a generation's search for safety and rules, and the national yearning for a new moral order to replace the social and religious structures we have lost. Here for the first time is the history, personal and cultural, of the most profound shift in our national life in the last three decades: the movement from a wild-eyed ethos of sexual freedom to the new conservative morality of the nineties. In prose as absorbing as a novel, Roiphe gives us the inner landscape of a generation that remembers where it was on the day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive the way previous generations recall the day JFK was shot. We meet right-wing prophets of sexual abstinence in Washington, D.C., and public high school students and their teachers in suburban New Jersey. We enter the world of Alison Gertz, the Park Avenue debutante, and Magic Johnson, the ebullient point guard for the Lakers who boasted of satisfying six women at once, whose stories have imprinted themselves on the national imagination as moral parables for the uncertain and often terrifying age in which we live now.

The last days of five great thinkers, writers and artists - as they come to terms with the reality of approaching deathKatie Roiphe's extraordinary book is filled with intimate and surprising revelations. Susan Sontag, consummate public intellectual, finds her rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Seventy-six year old John Updike's response to a fatal diagnosis is to begin a poem. Dylan Thomas's fatal collapse on the floor of a Greenwich Village tavern is preceded by a fortnight of almost suicidal excess. Sigmund Freud understands his hastening decline. Maurice Sendak shows his lifelong obsession with death in his beloved books.The Violet Hour - urgent and unsentimental - helps us to be less afraid in the face of death.

'Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days?... We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.'

Drawing on the memoirs, letters and diaries of a group of British intellectuals writing between 1910 and the Second World War, UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS paints a witty and insightful portrait of seven 'marriages a la mode', each triumphantly casting off Victorian inhibitions and pursuing bohemian ideals of freedom and equality.But as well as love and passion, there were tolerance, denial, anger, jealousy and drama. The Bloomsbury group's Clive and Vanessa Bell opened up their marriage to accommodate Vanessa's live-in lovers, and Clive's obsession with his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf. H.G. Well's steadfast wife sent her love to his mistress Rebecca West when their son was born. And Vera Brittain and Katherine Mansfield, more devoted to their work than to their husbands, wrestled with unfulfilled desires.This is both a fascinating exploration of love, affection and friendship in marriage, and a brilliantly entertaining account of a dazzling era of high-society high living.