A provocative memoir, refreshingly candid and thoughtful.
Bolen recounts an impressive career as an employment recruiter and his lifelong struggle to come to grips with his gay identity.
The author began his career in employment staffing with a show of remarkable confidence—in 1969, he showed up at Snelling and Snelling, then the largest employment agency in the United States, and demanded a job. He was 21 years old, a college dropout, and had no relevant work experience. Not only was the author hired, but he became the company’s top producer within three months. He had made his first million dollars before the age of 30. In 1985, Bolen started his own firm, Dan Bolen and Associates, which he owned and operated until his retirement in 2018: It was the conclusion to a half-century brimming with financial success and the industry’s most coveted accolades. Yet his personal life was a mess. Although Bolen knew he was attracted to men, he assiduously kept his sexual orientation a closely guarded secret. In fact, he buried this truth so deep inside of himself that it outwardly expressed itself as homophobia, a wrenching dilemma that led to suicidal depression. The author’s remembrances here are rich and complex—the book begins as a somewhat conventional account of his entrepreneurial success, an almost self-aggrandizing catalog of his “unrelenting drive to succeed.” The heart of the story, however, is not his professional life but the personal travails that he concealed behind the curtain of accomplishment. With admirable candor, he discusses his troubled relationship with an abusive father, his two failed marriages, and his challenges as a Jehovah’s Witness, a religious sect that finally expelled him. With nuanced sensitivity, Bolen reflects on the emotional toll exacted by living a lie: “Who would I be without the secret? Because I had become the secret.” This is an affectingly honest, even confessional life story, one marked by both keen intelligence and fearless self-criticism.
A provocative memoir, refreshingly candid and thoughtful.Pub Date: July 28, 2022
ISBN: 9781734877458
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Avery Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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