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 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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