A satisfying success story from a reliably outspoken raconteur.
The bestselling author is back with a chronicle of his exasperating love life in New York City following addiction and recovery.
In his latest autobiographical story, Burroughs (This Is How, 2012, etc.) traces his frustrating track record with men and eternal search for true love in the big city. He opens with a break in his long-held sobriety in the mid-1990s, during which he landed a date with Mitch, a “deeply odd,” gay writer—in fact, the author of one of Burroughs’ “favorite books.” They fell for each other quickly and entered into an up-and-down relationship. At the beginning of the book, the author intersperses these episodes with snippets of history from his early life in advertising in Boston and driving cross-country to San Francisco. A love affair with a man named George followed, but George’s death, which introduces the book’s commanding center section, threw Burroughs into a drunken spiral of bed-wetting and compulsive QVC gem-buying marathons, which inspired his 2000 novel Sellevision. Romantic feelings for Christopher, his agent at the time, derailed when Christopher divulged his HIV-positive status. The deflated author then went on a dating spree with men who weren’t “medically off limits.” Throughout, Burroughs is hypercritical of his love interests—e.g., the fine lines around Mitch’s eyes gave him a “ravaged by time” look. Some readers may find that the author’s early impressions of dating someone with AIDS are insensitive. However, he writes colorfully of his time with “normal and stable” Dennis, with whom he had a powerful yet different kind of relationship “because I was sober and actually experiencing it”; the relationship waxed and waned through passion, conflict, disillusionment, and an eventual separation. An admittance of his undeniable love for Christopher, who had since battled cancer but was game for the challenge of loving the writer unconditionally, opens the third part of this serpentine dating memoir, which ends with bright beams of contentment and happiness.
A satisfying success story from a reliably outspoken raconteur.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-34203-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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