Problem: Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky; June 28, 1926) is an American actor, writer, producer, director, comedian, and composer. He is known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows. He created, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series Get Smart, which ran from 1965 to 1970.

Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Max and Kate (nee Brookman) Kaminsky, and grew up in Williamsburg. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (present-day Gdansk, Poland); his mother's family were Jews from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. Brooks' father died of kidney disease at 34 when Brooks was 2 years old. He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems--like a punch in the face."  Brooks was a small, sickly boy who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size. He grew up in tenement housing. At age 9, Brooks went to a Broadway show with his uncle Joe--a taxi driver who would drive the Broadway doormen back to Brooklyn for free and was given the tickets in gratitude--and saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the Garment District like everyone else but was absolutely going into show business. He was taught by Buddy Rich (who had also grown up in Williamsburg) how to play the drums and started earning money at it when he was 14.  After attending Abraham Lincoln High School for a year, Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School and then spent a year at Brooklyn College as a psychology major before being drafted into the army in 1944. He attended the Army Specialized Training Program conducted at the Virginia Military Institute (although not as a VMI cadet), and served in the United States Army as a corporal in the 1104 Engineer Combat Battalion, 78th Infantry Division, defusing land mines during World War II.

Did he have any other education?

Answer with quotes: He attended the Army Specialized Training Program


Problem: Henry Havelock Ellis, known as Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 - 8 July 1939), was an English physician, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-authored the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis. Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896.

Dr. Havelock Ellis' 1933 book, Psychology of Sex, is one of the many manifestations of his interest in human sexuality. In this book, he goes into vivid detail of how children can experience sexuality differently in terms of time and intensity. He mentions that it was previously believed that, in childhood, humans had no sex impulse at all. "If it is possible to maintain that the sex impulse has no normal existence in early life, then every manifestation of it at that period must be 'perverse,'" he adds. He continues by stating that, even in the early development and lower function levels of the genitalia, there is a wide range of variation in terms of sexual stimulation. He claims that the ability of some infants producing genital reactions, seen as "reflex signs of irritation" are typically not vividly remembered. Since the details of these manifestations are not remembered, there is no possible way to determine them as pleasurable. However, Ellis claims that many people of both sexes can recall having agreeable sensations with the genitalia as a child. "They are not (as is sometimes imagined) repressed." They are, however, not usually mentioned to adults. Ellis argues that they typically stand out and are remembered for the sole contrast of the intense encounter to any other ordinary experience.  Ellis claims that sexual self-excitement is known to happen at an early age. He references authors like Marc, Fonssagrives, and Perez in France who published their findings in the nineteenth century. These early ages are not strictly limited to ages close to puberty as can be seen in their findings. These authors provide cases for children of both sexes who have masturbated from the age of three or four. Ellis references Robie's findings that boys' first sex feelings appear between the ages of five and fourteen. For girls, this age ranges from eight to nineteen. For both sexes, these first sexual experiences arise more frequently during the later years as opposed to the earlier years. Ellis then references Hamilton's studies that found twenty percent of males and fourteen percent of females have pleasurable experiences with their sex organs before the age of six. This is only supplemented by Ellis' reference to Katharine Davis' studies, which found that twenty to twenty-nine percent of boys and forty-nine to fifty-one percent were masturbating by the age of eleven. However, in the next three years after, boys' percentages exceeded that of girls.  Dr. Ellis also contributed to the idea of varying levels of sexual excitation. He asserts it is a mistake to assume all children experience are able to experience genital arousal or pleasurable erotic sensations. He proposes cases where an innocent child is led to believe that stimulation of the genitalia will result in a pleasurable erection. Some of these children may fail and not be able to experience this either pleasure or an erection until puberty. Ellis concludes, then, that children are capable of a "wide range of genital and sexual aptitude." Ellis even considers ancestry as contributions to different sexual excitation levels, stating that children of "more unsound heredity" and/or hypersexual parents are "more precociously excitable."

What was the name of the book?

Answer with quotes:
Psychology of Sex,