Book description
Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The
Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a
wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are
simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and
Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to.
How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How
do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do
those who have them, live with them?
In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into
human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes
anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes
redeeming, and always powerful force. Immersing himself in it through
the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time
with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and
illuminates layers of our humanity.
Daniel Bergner is drawn to people, and to stories, that illuminate
the struggle we all face to make our lives meaningful. From living with
convicts sentenced to life in a tough American prison to travelling
across Sierra Leone in the wake of its brutal civil war, he has always
been drawn to those who live at the extremes of experience.
Soldiers
of Light
, his book on Sierra Leone, won the Index on Censorship's Freedom of
Expression Award and a Lettres-Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage.
It was hailed by the
Guardian
as 'Riveting, elegiac... genius' and by the
Sunday Times
as 'a rare book indeed ... one in which both author and reader are
irrevocably changed'. He writes for the
New York Times
Magazine and has spent a number of year with the subjects of this book.
