Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a...
Ruminations on life, love, and lesbian subcultures.
In her first book-length nonfiction (her work also appears in Out magazine and online at LesbiaNation.com), novelist Williams (Girl Walking Backwards, 1998) starts with her drive to a nightclub holding a Trash Disco Night. The goings-on are appropriately depraved and less than logical, peripherally involving Williams’s non-obsessive non-relationship with a gorgeous submissive named Anikka. The text moves on to other topics, but in a sense never quite leaves the nightclub. Like most members of her early-30s generation, the writer is impressively grounded in pop and underground culture; the highlight here is her visit to Ladyfest, a riotgrrl music/political awareness festival in Olympia, Washington. Wandering among the testy mix of young hippie women and overly fashion-conscious punk chicks, Williams gets antsy at just how hard it is to get laid in this achingly PC landscape: “The phrase ‘identity politics’ makes me want to become a heroin addict. I have dents in my wall from hurling books by bell hooks.” There’s a lot more in that vein: slashing attacks on the stifling attitudes of her lesbian nation that are yet leavened with a desperate, passionate love. (Perhaps you can only truly critique what you adore.) The author’s intelligent, self-deprecating manner allows her to pull off pretty much anything, from reflecting on her relationship with a teenaged girl—oh-so-improper, she knows—to rhapsodizing about the wrestling parties she hosts for her friends involving a real wrestling mat and lots of vegetable oil.
Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a smart, breezy woman who’s game for just about anything and has something sharp to say all the time.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-785-9
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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