Tobias, premier financial author (The Only Other Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need, 1987; My Vast Fortune, 1997, etc.), now turns to autobiography and reveals to the few who don—t already know that he is homosexual. A quarter-century ago, using a nom de plume, Tobias wrote a gay classic, The Best Little Boy in the World, which has never since gone out of print. Now, using his true name, he brings us up to date on his own parallel progress in straight and gay worlds, and on the advances America has made in confronting those, like himself, whose “sex drive had been multiplied by minus one.” His concerns are unsurprising in an-emerging-from-the-closet memoir: how to tell the folks (there was no problem with the Tobiases, once Andy got around to doing it); dealing with losses to AIDS; loneliness; dating and the search for Mr. Right (his type is Tom Cruise); all the many blighted romances and the rigors of true love. Along the way come serial relationships with Peter, Scot, Ed, Tony, Bruce, Matt, Stevie, Tab, and now Charles, with whom Tobias has exchanged rings. And tells of the Renaissance Weekends—where our Merry Andrew became a true Friend of Bill, the Friendly President—and festive weekends at Fire Island, etc., etc. Withal, nothing much here is shocking. Tobias admits to being a good hugger but happily won’t confide further. Yet the text may enrage Trent Lott and Pat Robertson anyhow. It will probably engage some in the gay and lesbian community. The languorous passages may simply bore many straights who wander in hoping for investment advice. Tobias pleads for understanding, maybe a contribution to a good gay-rights cause, and, of course, auto insurance reform (his other constant worry). (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50111-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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
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