A book of humor and heart and a vision of life lived fully, Savage paints a picture of an ideal home for his and his...
Savage’s memoir of his experience with adoption reveals an acid tongue and a boundless heart, a savvy blending of social commentary and self-deprecating humor, with an ending so sentimental that, in comparison to the beatific vision of Daddies Dan and Terry, June and Ward Cleaver would look like Al and Peg Bundy.
Known for his trenchant wit and outspoken attitude in his nationally syndicated sex advice column, Savage is the queer incarnation of Dorothy Parker and Dr. Ruth, with a little Dr. Laura Schlesinger thrown in for good measure. In The Kid, which he confesses he wrote primarily for the scads of money the publishers threw at him, his indefatigable tirades against homophobia and heterosexism are played off to delightful effect against the story of adopting baby Daryl Jude. Savage details the long and arduous adoption process that he and his boyfriend endured: the seminars with the adoption agency; the agony of waiting to be picked by a birth mother; the fears that she would change her mind and keep the baby; and the burgeoning relationship with both the birth mother and the baby’s biological father, who they thought would never appear. Along the way, Savage revels in his rejection of the sanitized and homogenized model of the innocuous homosexual and blatantly exposes all of his dirty laundry, from bondage to drugs, from messy housekeeping to strained relationships with some family members. He discloses this litany of character flaws because he wants to underscore the fact that imperfect people—even if they're gay—can be good parents.
A book of humor and heart and a vision of life lived fully, Savage paints a picture of an ideal home for his and his boyfriend’s child in its blemished humanity and right-on queerness; it’s a book that can’t be put down for the same reasons.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94525-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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