by Brad Gooch ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2015
This candid memoir lovingly evokes a life, and a world, lost.
Filmmaker Howard Brookner (1954-1989) is the focus of this engrossing, intimate memoir by novelist and biographer Gooch (English/William Paterson Univ.; Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, 2009, etc.).
Meeting at a gay bar in Manhattan in the 1970s, Gooch and Brookner felt instant attraction and rapport. “Our warped lives, our shared predilection for the ‘far out,’ was a bond between Howard and me, as well as between us and our peers,” writes the author. “We were all trying strenuously to walk on the wild side.” An “increasingly bold and expressionist phase of gay culture” fueled that wildness with rent boys and bathhouses, speed, cocaine and heroin. Brookner was involved in making a documentary about the notorious writer William Burroughs. Gooch, after earning a doctorate in English at Columbia, detoured to become a male model. Needing a portfolio, he approached the only photographer he knew: Robert Mapplethorpe. “Robert and I were both pretty clueless about fashion photography,” Gooch admits, and the results were bizarre. In Paris on a modeling gig, Gooch met the young Andy Warhol, “weirdly, transparently needy and vulnerable,” and spent some time on “Planet Warhol…a giddy, weightless planet, but without much oxygen.” When modeling ran dry, Gooch turned to writing, first porn reviews for a gay newspaper, then fiction, mainstream articles and interviews. Brookner’s career took off after he released Burroughs: The Movie in 1983, to critical raves. By then, however, gay exuberance was tempered by rumors of an insidious virus. In 1987, Brookner tested positive for HIV. For Gooch, the news felt like “emotional whiplash.” Soon, Brookner fell prey to an opportunistic virus that affected brain cells, and he began to lose his sight. Spasms, fever and bacterial pneumonia followed. At the age of 35, a man Gooch calls “a cresting young genius” was dead.
This candid memoir lovingly evokes a life, and a world, lost.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0062354952
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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