A vivid and dramatic slice of adolescence.
Reflections on growing up goth and gay in Texas at the dawn of the 1990s—based on the author’s one-man show.
As a gay teenager in Texas, writer and performer Crabb suffered the abuse of having his head smashed with encyclopedias and enduring hate speeches from his classmates. By the time he entered high school, the author’s denial of his sexuality was tested when he began listening to George Michael’s “Faith” and was introduced to Interview magazine, with its glossy, artful spreads of male models. Suddenly, the message that seemingly everyone else around him had received made sense to Crabb, yet he persisted in repressing his feelings, despite his first crush on the mysterious new student named Greg. To make matters more confusing, he came of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic and hysteria, when “you couldn’t watch MTV for more than ten minutes without hearing about AIDS.” Crabb’s gradual sexual awakening and comfort with his own identity coincided with his friendship with Greg, who also admitted to being gay. Together, the two acclimated themselves to the “freak” crowd, circulating in the teen club scene around San Antonio and excessive experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Their friendship forms the backbone of Crabb’s narrative, as each relied on the other to help understand his identity in the face of intolerance and violence. Though the author’s story wonderfully captures the awkwardness, strife, and even terror of his experience as a gay teen, it is also upbeat, endearing, and achingly funny. (The mall-rat generation will be especially at home with Crabb.) The author experienced all the highs and lows of adolescence, from the reckless pleasures of youth to the inevitable distance and loneliness of outgrowing relationships.
A vivid and dramatic slice of adolescence.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237128-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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