This is an excellent book, covering a wide range of topics. I'm relatively new at this "game", and I found this book very informative, enhancing both my pleasure as well as my partner's. It also gives some insight into many sexual problems, or percieved problems, and how to deal with them. It made me much more confident, and what I thought were problems or limitations for me, are now resolved... we're having a great time! Five stars.

This book does it all in plain english and easy-to-understand text. It covers the subject of sexual fulfilment from all angles and from every perspective. It is interesting, well written, and even funny. It is written to help everyone and has something for everyone. It is not intended for those who are not interested in learning about sex and how to enjoy yourself with your partner. It opens your eyes to the best about sex and how to bring yourself into the game correctly. It covers such subjects as: being inhibited, how your body works, having sexual hang-ups( good or bad ones), infighting between partners, communicating between partners, living with the right sex(partner), fears, anxieties, and even jealousies. I found it's advice to be helpful, correct and totally facinating plus informative. I do not think that anyone could be so perfect as to not be reinformed, or informed again, by this narrative. I am always amazed to find out in this world of ours today, how little I really know about this subject. Thank you to these authors for covering the subject so well.

According to Lionel Abel, classic tragedy died with Macbeth, and a new kind of pseudo-tragedy rose with Hamlet. Since "pseudo-tragedy" is a mouthful and Abel is a contemporary of those critics whose life's work, it would seem, was to add "meta-" to everything, Abel decided to call this new kind of drama "metatheatre." What is metatheatre? Simply put, it's the conversion of the tragic (anti-) hero's firm belief in forces outside his control-- the gods in Sophocles, or the Weird Sisters (Abel's take on them: a corrpution of the Three Furies, a view I suspect myself) in Macbeth-- to the (anti-) hero's less firm belief in the motives of humanity, and more importantly, the (anti-) hero's ability to put on an act in order to deceive the other players. The layers of an onion-- the actor acting a part to the audience, and acting a different part to the other actors.

Hamlet, according to Abel, was the turning point. It not only contained this mechanism-- given free rein by letting the other actors in the play think Hamlet was mad, leaving Hamlet to essentially do what he liked-- but was also metaphorized by the play-within-a-play Hamlet stages to uncover the treachery of his stepfather. If you believe Abel, Hamlet is, simply, the finest drama in the history of the form, and I'm not inclined to disagree. After this explication (a lucid and interesting one-- unlike many) of Hamlet, Abel whirls us through the next three hundred odd years of paywriting, giving us examples of metatheatrical works which have been mislabeled as tragedy down through the ages, both in drama and fiction (he specifically contrasts Don Quixote with El Cid in one essay), and makes a strong case for metatheatre as a valid genre on the stage.

Unlike most works of theatrical criticism-- I'm not a big stage fan, so I find most of it way above my head-- Abel's little work is readable, understandable, and finishable by the average joe on the street with more than an eighth-grade education. It may even lead more people to want to experience the theatre (at least, as long as it stays away from musicals). A fine little achievement that I hope is still in print.