On Kissing: Travels in an Intimate Landscape

""A kiss tells the whole story of humankind,"" declares freelance journalist Blue, citing the continuum between sustenance and sexuality. With an early chapter titled ""A Natural History of Kissing,"" this book contains echoes of Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses. If Blue lacks Ackerman's lyricism, her eclectic approach--citing literature, film, anthropology, vampirology and more--provides an appealing kaleidoscope of perspectives. A wide range of mammals, she writes, have sex and even orgasms without face-to-face intercourse; Blue speculates that kissing was the key to human sexuality. She offers a tart comment on the Sleeping Beauty myth, calling it a pernicious ""travesty of kissing,"" in which the female must accept sexuality but not her own. The kiss as human social ritual, she observes, can enforce both equality, as among friends, or inequality--kissing the Pope's ring--with the distance from the face an indicia of status. Her analysis of famous film kisses is savvy: the sexiest one, to her, was between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. Blue returns, ultimately, to the primacy of kissing in sexuality. It is reciprocal, unlike oral sex or (sometimes) coital sex: ""In anatomy, indeed, may be intimacy."" (June)