An authentic memoir of an openly gay, 10-year member of the U.S. armed forces.
With writerly panache and a refreshingly direct tone, the 40-year-old Jones relates the story of his life. He grew up as a middle child plagued by ADHD under the watchful eye of an Air Force officer father and a mother who became a born-again Christian and an anti-sugar health-food fanatic. He chronicles the family’s many relocations due to his father’s military service—first to Korea, where he explored subterranean tunnels with his brother Marc; and then to Arizona; Cairo; and finally Austin, Texas, where his parents enrolled him in a strictly regimented “boy’s ranch.” The school, however, only ended up distancing him from his parents further, as he inched closer to acknowledging and consummating his homosexual feelings. Desperate to “prove to the world that this ‘faggot’ would accomplish what tens of thousands of straight men had failed to do,” Jones enlisted in the Navy, and his bold journey to become a SEAL began in boot camp during an icy northern Illinois winter. Along the way, he furtively socialized in a clandestine gay club in Mississippi and made two attempts at surmounting a particularly grueling Hell Week during SEAL training in Southern California. He depicts his military service in spirited chapters that offer readers a vicarious view of troop platoon life. He engagingly crafts his most vivid memories into nostalgic anecdotes; some are harrowing, such as a near-death experience he had as a child, and some are unjust and humiliating, such as his military discharge in 2003 for reported homosexual behavior. Jones is a talented writer who quickly gets his story across without unnecessary exposition. He brings a sharp personal perspective to the final chapter: a letter to his young son about how to live life fearlessly and without regret. Readers interested in the experience of being gay in the military, and its former “don’t ask, don’t tell” conundrum, will find Jones’ memoir a rewarding experience.
An unflinchingly honest autobiography written with brevity, charm, passion and immense patriotism.
Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1457531071
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
