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Until GR friend Henry Le Nav recently rated and commented on David Reuben's EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX: BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, this work hung out in the "cold storage" unit of my memories. The only way in which my familiarity with it would show up was in some variation of Sol Weinstein's mockery of Reuben's book: EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX*: *BUT I'LL TELL YOU ANYWAY. No surprise here -- I have a tendency to share boring information (i.e., not about sex) that other people don't want to hear.

My seeing the work mentioned in a GR daily update, though, dragged it out of "cold storage." And while I hold the popular view that its audience grew up, grew old, lost control over bodily functions, remembers only stuff that happened a long time ago, and thinks a six-hour erection is Cialis's best side-effect, I also want to say that Reuben's book had its day, actually many days, in the sun. Yes, if you didn't own a copy when I was an undergraduate, then you became the friend of someone who did, or you were part of a group lying in the sun and listening to the book's owner read the "good parts" aloud. Very valuable -- this Reuben book -- and very enlightening if you were born in the 1950's. Bibles were holy one day a week; that book with the sun-colored cover was holy on the other six.

It gets a five-star rating from the eighteen-year-old in me.

ADDENDUM

I seldom read reviews of books that I've read. And I don't ordinarily write a review of a work that I haven't recently read. But having posted a "review" of a book that I read too long ago to remember well, I decided to look at other GR members' responses to EVERYTHING. . . . I discovered that some readers found parts of the work -- particularly Reuben's discussion of homosexuality -- misleading and offensive. The refuted / discredited material is not entirely useless; it does, after all, illuminate prevailing attitudes and beliefs of a bygone era. Nevertheless, I understand the complaints; and I hope that anyone who notices that I gave Reuben's book five stars will not mistakenly conclude that the rating reveals something other than the importance of the work to many baby boomers.