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
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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