Tiber squeezes life for all it is worth, ringing out the last quarter of the 20th century with the offbeat, at-times twisted...
Tiber picks up where he left off in Taking Woodstock (2007) with this memoir of the years thereafter, pivotal ones both for him and the gay community.
At the age of 34, the author was helping his parents run the bedraggled, customer-free El Monaco motel in upstate New York. A “secretly gay Brooklyn-bred yeshiva boy,” Tiber actually had a life before El Monaco—he was a successful interior designer in Manhattan—but he was a dutiful son, even if his mother was a “smug and kosher bird of prey.” Woodstock, which he helped arrange by getting his neighbor Max Yasgur, “our milkman,” to rent his field for the concert, was his salvation, giving him faith in humanity just when he needed it. This memoir scans Tiber’s life progress since that August weekend in 1969 with a fair degree of adrenaline (“I barreled through the Midwest like a man with his pubic hair on fire”), cogency (despite the wild chronicles of all the recreational intoxicants and late-night, leather-bar sex) and straining-at-the-leash humor. There was a promising, then fizzling, stint in Hollywood, followed by a return to El Monaco, where Tiber managed to sell the place—“Is this guy actually about to make me an offer for this shithole?” Then there was Andre, who would become the love of the author’s life and with whom he would launch numerous artistic endeavors. Tiber writes about their life with unvarnished intimacy. Fortunately, Andre brought with him a measure of class to rein in the absurdist, wear-it-on-your-sleeve Tiber, though it has not diminished his zest. His political and literary high points are balanced by the low points of breakups and the AIDS epidemic, captured with dazed immediacy.
Tiber squeezes life for all it is worth, ringing out the last quarter of the 20th century with the offbeat, at-times twisted humor of a survivor.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7570-0392-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Square One Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
