The frank and sometimes-graphic timeline of one gay man’s life, his involvement in promoting gay rights, and the AIDS...
A key member of the San Francisco gay movement traces his life story.
Like many homosexuals born in the 1950s, Jones “grew up not knowing if there was anyone else on the planet who felt the way we felt.” Then he moved from Phoenix to San Francisco and discovered the blossoming world of like-minded individuals who relished their new sexual freedom and transformed neighborhoods into havens for the gay community. In this honest, occasionally explicit narrative, Jones discusses his own gayness and the partying, dancing, drugs, and sex with multiple partners that he and so many others engaged in during the 1970s and ’80s. He traveled through Europe, enjoying the scenery and beautiful men he found along the way, but he always wound up returning to San Francisco. Eager to help the “movement,” Jones worked in Harvey Milk’s office and was present the day he was murdered, an event that led the author to more political and social activism. When the AIDS epidemic struck, killing thousands, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and was the inspiration and push behind the AIDS Memorial Quilt project. Jones provides readers with a precise, uninhibited, inside look into the gay movement from its inception to its present-day status. He includes multiple references to world events as they happened through the past few decades, which help ground readers and link the actions in the gay world to those of society at large. Numerous lovers, political activists, and friends are included in this raw and expressive memoir, which features its most touching moments as Jones describes the anguish and sorrow he and so many others experienced as the AIDS crisis clobbered the gay community.
The frank and sometimes-graphic timeline of one gay man’s life, his involvement in promoting gay rights, and the AIDS epidemic.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-31-631543-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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