Gay British filmmaker Jarman, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, follows up his cannon-blast memoir At Your Own Risk (1992) and his memoir of ``my Queerlife,'' Dancing Ledge (p. 505), with his 1989-90 diary of his days fighting his demons while facing the prospect of full-blown AIDS. The diary's overall theme is that of Jarman's illness and what he's doing about it. He begins filming The Garden—a kind of gay Garden of Gethsemane story set in the exquisitely kept (or at least exquisitely described) garden he tends at his coastal cottage at bleak Dungeness. Now and then, the diary looks back frankly at his youth, then at his now-faded love life, or rather sex life, since his friend Howard still lavishes much care and love on him throughout. What there's no getting around here is the immense ``footage'' Jarman gives to his garden, with page after page of silverpoint about his plants and flowers—growths that for most readers will register as totally unfamiliar. But no matter: It's Jarman's tie to his garden that counts—how it invigorates him, though temporary illnesses strike, including bronchitis and blindness. His film War Requiem is a bust, lasting but one week in New York before being pulled. His first week's rushes on The Garden are glaringly bad, ``out-of-focus shots, shots that fall like confetti. 16mm deadly, with no resonance. There is not a shot that is not ugly.'' When he finally begins taking AZT, the results aren't much better. Then the New York Film Festival turns down The Garden. Even so, ``I want to bear witness how happy I am, and will be until the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don't regret a single step or encounter I made in that time....'' Courageous stuff, often very well written. (Nineteen b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1994
ISBN: 0-87951-520-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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