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
PROFILES
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of...
A splendid life of an enlightened reactionary and forgotten Founding Father.
“In all probability,” writes financial historian/biographer Chernow (Titan, 1998, etc.), “Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and lasting impact than many who did.” Indeed, we live in a Hamiltonian republic through and through, and not a Jeffersonian democracy. Many of the financial and tax systems that Hamilton proposed and put in place as the nation’s first treasury secretary are with us today, if in evolved form, as Chernow shows; and though Hamilton was derided in his time as being pro-British and even a secret monarchist, Chernow writes, he was second only to George Washington in political prominence, at least on the practical, day-to-day front. The author wisely acknowledges but does not dwell unduly on Washington’s quasi-paternal role in Hamilton’s life and fortunes; unlike many biographies that consider Hamilton only in Washington’s shadow, this one grants him a life of his own—and a stirring one at that, for Hamilton was both intensely cerebral and a man of action. He was, Chernow writes, a brilliant ancestor of the abolitionist cause; a native of the slave island of Nevis, he came to hate “the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves”—a dichotomy that influenced his views of ordinary politics. He was also constantly in opposition to things as they were, particularly where those things were Jeffersonian; as Chernow shows, Hamilton had early on been “an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, Native Americans, and Jews,” but became a crusty conservative near the end of his brief life (1755–1804), perhaps as a result of one too many personal setbacks at the hands of the Jeffersonians.
Literate and full of engaging historical asides. By far the best of the many lives of Hamilton now in print, and a model of the biographer’s art.Pub Date: April 26, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-009-2
Page Count: 802
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.
Writer, producer and director Rae, famous for her popular Web series, "The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl," channels her humor and attention to detail into this eponymous collection of personal essays about all the embarrassing moments that have made her who she is.
Sharp and able to laugh at herself, the author writes as if she's unabashedly telling friends a stream of cringeworthy stories about her life. Having grown up with the understanding that laughing at and talking about people was a form of entertainment and bonding, Rae continues the tradition by inviting readers into her inner circle and making her own foibles her primary focus. Almost 30, she opens up about nearly everything in her life, from her lifelong fear of being watched while eating in public to acutely awkward experiences with Internet dating and cybersex. The theme that race plays in this book is integral, although Rae's approach, as with all of her subjects, is decidedly humorous and lighthearted; she veers, always, toward a personal tone as opposed to one that's political or polemical. Her unwavering candidness, the sheer energy of her voice and the fact that she clearly finds herself to be terrific material make her a charismatic, if occasionally exasperating, narrator worth rooting for. Having been in a committed relationship for seven years, Rae unpacks how her Senegalese parents’ union contributed to her attitude (indifference) toward marriage. Some readers will find her proclamations and direct confessions offensive and be turned off; others may be offended but laugh out loud anyway. In Rae, her audience has landed on a singular voice with the verve and vivacity of uncorked champagne.
An authentic and fresh extension of the author’s successful Web series.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1476749051
Page Count: 210
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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