Indiana remarks that his memories are “colored by mood and contingency.” The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter,...
A writer, filmmaker, playwright, and artist recalls his past.
In this ironically titled memoir, Indiana (Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, 2010, etc.) gives little evidence of love but much graphic detail of sex, focused often on comparative penis sizes and tumescence. Although he claims to have “an unshakeable sense of utter insignificance,” being “too peculiar to figure importantly in anyone’s life, including my own,” his voice throughout tends to be supercilious. Indiana characterizes his parents as “emotionally constipated,” creating an environment that prepared him “for absolutely nothing.” Growing up within “a swamp of human wreckage tainted by alcohol,” any problem, he was taught, “was other people’s fault.” Early sexual experiences with boys left him believing that “sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality.” In his 20s, he was subject to panic attacks and depression; pickups did not fulfill his “pinching wish for attachment.” In late-1960s California, Indiana “lived on no money, with no fixed address, becoming a ward of whatever boyfriend or commune whose orbit I drifted into,” usually connected to his friend Ferd, a political activist and porno filmmaker. In those years, writes the author, psychedelic drugs “were taken like aspirin…and heroin users were seen as the truly daring souls, more ‘seriously’ troubled than aimless run-of-the-mill LSD dropouts.” Ferd often sent him to emergency rooms to steal syringes, errands he performed with alacrity. Later, living in Cuba, the author had an affair—“a complete pornographic fantasy”—with a sexually energetic deaf mute, a relationship he quickly found “tiresome.” Among those singled out for scorn is Susan Sontag: arrogant, “exasperating,” a woman whose “chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses.” David Lynch was humorless, boring, and “smarmy.”
Indiana remarks that his memories are “colored by mood and contingency.” The mood of this memoir is mostly rueful, bitter, and sad.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4686-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
