Energetically ambivalent memoir of a gay wedding as a family milestone. Despite his arguments to the contrary, Savage takes...
Seattle sex-columnist Savage (The Kid, 1999, etc.) has found the man of his dreams and adopted a baby. According to his mother, he’s finally ready to get married.
Savage is a surprising combination of bad boy and good son. His public persona—blunt, often rude and always political—has made him a lightning rod in the gay community, and Savage’s long-time fans will recognize his signature mix of wit and annoyance. Adapting the format that serves him so well as a columnist, Savage constructs his memoir out of short, loosely related chapters about the avalanche of details that magically appear once his mother begins her campaign for a wedding. To his irritation, he and his boyfriend are inevitably pulled into the matrimony business. Savage is especially amusing when recounting the pre-wedding horrors: a visit to a wedding expo (hypnotizing and repulsive); attempts to book a reception hall at a Chinese restaurant during Chinese New Year (an accident of planning for which he and his boyfriend blame one another); arguments about wedding cakes (they get two at $500 a pop); and half-heartedly planned escape routes (does getting matching tattoos count as a gay commitment?). The book takes on cherished ideas about gay marriage, marriage in general, heterosexuality and the ideal of monogamy. Savage is a master of gleeful ill-will, but even so, some of his screeds are unnecessary—the stories of his forays into the wedding complex illustrate his arguments just as well. The author has a keen eye for the ironies of modern couplehood, and he doesn’t mind airing his own dirty laundry if it will get him a laugh and some political capital, but the real stars of this book are the extended Savage family, and his boyfriend. They are clearly the reason Savage is such a well-adjusted malcontent.
Energetically ambivalent memoir of a gay wedding as a family milestone. Despite his arguments to the contrary, Savage takes a resigned pleasure making an honest family man of himself.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-94907-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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