Book Description

Full of quirky characters that populate a profession most of us know little about, Touchy Subjects is a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of those who make their living touching others. In this tell-all memoir, Steve Capellini, author of Massage for Dummies and other mainstream massage titles, yanks the draping sheet aside and comes clean about the temptations and transgressions that have marked his own career. Then he embarks upon a far-flung adventure seeking the true meaning of human touch.From a Madison Avenue boardroom to a gross anatomy lab; from the deck of a private yacht to a seedy Asian massage parlor, the author uncovers stories that others haven't told: sex stories, prostitution stories, adultery stories and stories about a modern massage slave trade that ensnares hundreds of thousands of young women, many of them in the U.S., some of them working right in your home town.The author tangles with a Trinidadian rapist, a nymphomaniac ex-Playboy bunny, an impotent sea captain and an overweight multimillionaire ukulele player. Through each of these stories, he gradually guides the reader toward the underlying Truth of massage, debunking myths along the way and getting to the heart of what it's all about-touching people. The stories are interspersed with cutting-edge research on the science of touch, evolutionary biology and the grooming habits of some of our closet primate relatives, the bonobos.The author's quest to get to the bottom of touch takes him to a clothing optional hot springs resort in Northern California, a meditation retreat in the Virgin Islands, an ashram in the Berkshire mountains, behind the wheel of a Maserati on the back roads of Arizona and finally to Kathmandu Nepal where he meets a man who has risked everything-his health, his money and years of his life-on a quixotic mission to train "untouchables" to become massage therapists. It is there, among some of the world's most impoverished and oppressed people, that the true meaning of massage is revealed.Doing massage is a profession unlike any other, filled with flamboyant practitioners of all stripes. Touchy Subjects features them all, in a circus side show of chapters such as Nudity, Impotence, Adultery, Homosexuality, Cellulite and Disney World. Throughout each passage, Capellini seeks to answer important questions: Is it possible to touch dead people? What's it like to massage a horny guru? And what percentage of women have seduced their masseurs? Hint: it's high. This is a raucous, irreverent, insightful and, in the end, touching story about what it means to touch people, from someone who has, quite literally, touched thousands.