Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey

``I'm talking about the part of relationships no one ever talks about,'' asserts the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb --and the ghostwriter of two sex manuals--near the beginning of this detailed erotic history. By the end, readers may support that conventional reticence: the twice-married author (``I've slept with 11 women . . . five of them only once'') concludes with a relentlessly observed record of the sex enjoyed--and not--with his current long-term lover, identified as G---; he goes so far as to note changes in the color of her genitals. More engaging are Rhodes's recollections of his sexual coming-of-age, from his earliest autoerotic experiences through those (both solitary and with a boy) at the farm school where he spent most of his youth, to his losing his virginity with a prostitute while a freshman at Yale. His connecting of favored sexual fantasies and marathon masturbating sessions with circumstances of his childhood is intelligent and convincing. Rhodes finally acknowledges, with G---'s help, that his desire to arouse her to multiple orgasms had more to do with exercising power than with making love. (Sept.)