Engaging reminiscences from an ebullient storyteller.
Friends, lovers, and a few celebrities form the author’s logical, though not biological, family.
Fans of Maupin’s stories of gay life in San Francisco (The Days of Anna Madrigal, 2014, etc.) will find some familiar themes in this warm memoir. The son of a racist, homophobic conservative, the author grew up hiding his homosexuality, knowing the “revulsion, shame, disbelief,” and rejection that he would face. Yearning to win his father’s love, he became a staunch conservative himself; as a college student in the 1960s, he “railed against Socialists and peaceniks,” defended segregation, and enthusiastically spoke out against “radical social agitators.” He went to law school to follow in his father’s footsteps but was so bored that he dropped out only to pursue another of his father’s dreams: to see him in the military. Maupin recalls with affection his stint in Vietnam, where he became chief of staff to a sympathetic commander. His father, “who always said that God created a war for every generation of men in our family,” felt proud. His parents worried about his determination to be a writer, just as they worried about their son’s “lifestyle” choice, which they could not confront. Maupin’s professional breakthrough came when the San Francisco Chronicle commissioned him to write a five-day-a-week series of stories featuring a motley, eccentric, and appealing collection of characters, gay and straight, young and old, living in the author’s adopted city. The first installment of “Tales of the City” appeared on May 24, 1976, and changed his life. “The public was hooked on ‘Tales’ before the year was out,” he recalls. Collections of the stories were published and eventually turned into a miniseries starring Laura Linney (a cherished member of Maupin’s logical family). Loving remembrances abound—not least of his compassionate mother—as the author celebrates the many people who enriched his life; most famous among them are Christopher Isherwood, Ian McKellen, and Rock Hudson, with whom Maupin became “buddies with occasional benefits.”
Engaging reminiscences from an ebullient storyteller.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-239122-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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