Linda Coverdale

"In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the author's traumatic experience, written with a memoirist's immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope...

The novelist and fashion writer with French Elle magazine has penned an autobiographical tale of her renunciation of sex and the death of the desire that typically precedes the physical act. In a country that prides itself on the status of the French lover-- or "hot rabbits," as sexually "adventurous" politicians are often described-- Fontanel's declaration is akin to heresy. Complaining that she has had enough of being "taken and shaken" the well-known...