A searing coming-of-age account about sexual extremes.
A debut essay collection charts a man’s development from closeted Christian kid to liberated sex writer.
There was nothing about Cheves’ early life that hinted at his future career as the sex columnist for Out magazine. The adopted son of Evangelical Christian parents, the author was raised in rural, conservative Georgia. “They knew nothing about the woman who birthed me,” he writes of his parents, “except that she was described in the adoption papers as a dancer, a 1992 code word for prostitute, or so I’ve always believed.” His parents worked in Zambia as medical missionaries, where the young Cheves saw the ravages of AIDS firsthand. Back home in Georgia, he learned that gay sexuality was sinful according to the teachings of his Baptist congregation, and his father insisted that the author’s sexuality was the work of evil spirits. At college, Cheves was diagnosed as HIV-positive, only a couple of years after entering the gay dating scene for the first time. After initial panic and depression, the author came to accept his diagnosis and see himself within the continuum of HIV-positive artists and activists. With this collection, Cheves recounts his struggles to come to terms with himself as a young man caught between the rigid intolerance of his childhood and the exciting but sometimes dangerous world of adult sex. He learned how to date with his diagnosis, discovered his numerous—and often wild—kinks, and explored his ever evolving relationship with God. From the barns of rural Georgia to the sex dungeons of San Francisco, the newsrooms of Los Angeles, and the pride parades of Atlanta, the author tracks his own development through a series of lovers, relocations, hardships, and experiments. Easy answers are rare and difficult to come by, but Cheves’ life never ceases to offer test cases in the many different ways to find the limits of pleasure and pain.
The author’s prose style seems to hold nothing back, mixing stark admissions with arresting gallows humor: “My first Christmas as an HIV-positive man was rough. I was suicidal, and to make things worse, I worked at a restaurant. I attended the host desk; I was a host in so many ways. Whenever an unhappy guest complained about their table or the atmosphere, I was tempted to say, ‘You’re the reason I won’t be alive tomorrow, and I want you to live with that.’ ” Cheves excels at portraying sex and place, but more than anything he is a perceptive and shrewd writer about people. He approaches the characters who populate these pages with a generous helping of empathy, which makes the sometimes-extreme behavior he describes feel unexpectedly accessible. Although there are moments when the writing feels slightly self-indulgent—the author includes in full a poem he wrote as a college student—he makes up for it by consistently delivering poignant insights and shocking moments of beauty. While perhaps not for the most squeamish readers, the book presents an unapologetic vitality that will linger long after the covers are closed.
A searing coming-of-age account about sexual extremes.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9913780-3-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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