"what," the people I write about often ask, "are you doing here with me?" i heard the question in angola prison, louisiana's maximum security penitentiary, where i followed the lives of men sentenced to stay locked up until their deaths, with no chance of parole. i heard it in sierra leone, in west africa, where i attached myself to missionaries and mercenaries and child soldiers amid the most brutal war in recent memory. and i heard it as i sought the stories--of eros, obsession, anarchy, love--that fill the other side of desire.
"riveting...bergner's gift as a writer is his ability to combine the story-telling of a talented novelist with a journalist's skill at standing back and letting his subjects speak for themselves -- and to do so with compassion and curiosity rather than judgment...on one level, this book has all the elements of a top-rated HBO series -- provocatively graphic sex, humorous dialogue and moral ambiguity. but what makes is so powerful is that it's as much about desire and what's normal as it is an exploration of why we are the way we are...long after reading these disturbing stories, i can't seem to turn them off."
-- lori gottlieb, new york times book review
“girded with scientific data about the nature of sexual identity, the other side of desire is a foray into extreme passion, in quest of the human soul.”
-- O magazine
"the book is not written in clinical krafft-ebingese, but neither is it leering or salacious. the portraits are serious and even sympathetic, and their cumulative effect is to make readers realize that they understand a lot less about sex than they thought...'i decided i was going to go inside eros, inside our sexual selves,' bergner explained."
-- charles mcgrath, new york times
