A slightly bloated but addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.
An avant-garde writer recalls his journey from gutter drunk to PEN American member.
Kaufman (Matches, 2005, etc.) throws in his lot with the boozer bards in this second memoir about his near-lethal alcohol addiction, recovery and long struggle to become a writer. After touching briefly on his horrific childhood in the Bronx as the son of a French Jewish Holocaust survivor who beat him mercilessly (the territory of his first memoir, Jew Boy, 2000), Kaufman details his traumatizing years with the Israel Defense Forces and his torrid, adulterous affair (which inspired his novel Matches). Kaufman’s blackout drinking is epic throughout and reaches a crescendo when he returns to New York suffering psychotic delusions from PTSD sustained in the Israeli Army. The author’s narrative whips schizophrenically between manic moments of literary self-aggrandizing and deeply depressive moments of shocking wreckage (“Awoke in gutters or curled up to keep warm on manhole covers and grates in cul-de-sacs, filthy, nauseous, hungover, astonished at my gargantuan appetite for the abyss”). Acceptance into Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts program, his involvement with the emerging Spoken Word poetry scene and the birth of his daughter briefly buoyed him, but not enough to keep him from the bottle. Eventually he hit rock bottom and was kicked out of a crash pad by his acid-dealer roommates, becoming homeless. Kaufman’s sexual perversions sometimes serve his theme of bondage, but occasionally veer into misogyny. Literature literally saved the author, on a bench in New York’s Tompkins Square Park when a fellow poet talked him into trying recovery, and the second half of the book follows Kaufman’s journey to sobriety in San Francisco. The author’s intention to stake his territory among the literary elite is clear, but such efforts can feel name-droppy at times (an anecdote about desperately seeking Isaac Bashevis Singer at his Upper West Side apartment is interesting, but a listing of Kaufman’s Columbia classmates is not). Although the author’s tendency to drop the “I” from his sentence often feels affected, it also occasionally hit its mark, lending a hard edge to Kaufman’s largely intoxicating prose.
A slightly bloated but addictive memoir of self-destruction, recuperation and a literary coming-of-age.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-936740-02-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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