Biography of a gay-rights champion and author of the queer-cinema ur-text The Celluloid Closet (1981).
In this first book, Schiavi (English/New York Institute of Technology) looks at the life of Vito Russo (1946–1990), best known for co-founding the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Foundation (GLAAD) and for the aforementioned groundbreaking book. Russo’s name isn’t as well known as his major contributions to gay rights in the 1970s and ’80s, but Schiavi illuminates his short but productive life through access to Russo’s copious journals and numerous accomplishments—all without much reliance on the perspectives of anyone other than seemingly Russo himself. Although structured and written like a boilerplate academic study, the book is a total immersion into Russo’s daily life: his struggles growing up in dangerous 1960s East Harlem and then in culturally barren suburban New Jersey, and his developing interest in classic Hollywood film, which also helped shape his identity as a gay male in a largely homophobic American mainstream society. The narrative focuses particularly on Russo’s unglamorous persistence as a writer and lecturer, toiling for low pay for publications such as London’s Gay News and New York City publications like the Advocate and Christopher Street, but not finding much mainstream acceptance until tragically late in his career. Even the publication of The Celluloid Closet got him more publicity and recognition than publishing royalties. Schiavi’s chapters the years leading up to Russo’s death at age 44 from AIDS-related complications are also affecting but not always easy to digest. The author provides a sad reminder of the full fury of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, which struck so suddenly and took so many promising lives with it. Conventionally academic but complex portrait of an undeservedly obscure gay author and activist.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-299-28230-1
Page Count: 366
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
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