Full of small provocations—among them, “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay’ ”—this is a welcome portrait...
From renowned novelist and essayist White (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008, etc.), a graceful memoir of a decidedly ungraceful time in the life of New York City.
“In the 1970s in New York,” writes the author, “everyone slept till noon.” Also, “everyone smoked all the time, and when you French-kissed someone, it was like rubbing one ashtray against another.” The era was one of aspiration and poverty, of a time before New York had “become enslaved by wealth and glitz,” when “people still embraced Ezra Pound’s motto ‘Beauty is difficult.’ ” There is much difficult beauty—and much French kissing—in these pages, which recount White’s arrival to the city in 1962 as a transplanted Texan by way of Ann Arbor and his eventual assimilation. His arrival coincided with a slight but noticeable uptick in the general awareness that there were such a thing as gay people. White lived openly with a young man, but he still knotted his narrow tie carefully and went to work as one of the great silent majority. A “living contradiction,” he reveled in gay weekends while roiling in self-hatred and seeing a psychotherapist in the hope of turning straight and getting married. The cure didn’t take, and White’s self-awareness grew with times that included the rise of the so-called Pink Panthers and the Stonewall Riots. Those were times of danger. As White recounts, wary Manhattanites negotiated the city block by block, shunning, say, 85th Street in favor of one on either side of it and generally keeping doors bolted and windows gated. But they were also times of liberating art, with White enjoying the company of intellectuals and writers—including Richard Howard (“Every moment with him had a sense of occasion”), Richard Sennett (“an odd combination of schoolboy nerd, flamboyant queen, and Mrs. Astor”) and Simon Karlinsky—while publishing his first books and gaining recognition in the literary world.
Full of small provocations—among them, “I sometimes regret the invention of the category ‘gay’ ”—this is a welcome portrait of a time and place long past, and much yearned for.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-402-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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