A remarkably insightful and entertaining collection from a talented voice.
Wry, contemplative personal essays reflecting on travel, intimate connections, and the pursuit of a writing life.
In this debut collection, James (Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe, 2019) memorably revisits experiences from his past, whether random encounters or more significant life-changing events. In each case, he reveals impressive candor and depth of thought about his formative years and his development as a writer. The journey wasn’t always smooth, and the author is forthcoming about some of the many jobs he has had over the years, including answering phones at the San Francisco Ballet during Nutcracker season, a brief summer interlude at a gelato stand in Seattle, and an extended writing sabbatical (“writing aside, the primary gift of a residency is ample time half-free from the expectations of the world”) and stint at the Carson McCullers house in Columbus, Georgia. Frequent travel to both familiar and remote locations throughout the world allowed James to chronicle complicated and occasionally awkward interactions with foreign cultures. Throughout, he reflects on the nuanced challenges of personal interaction in any form, from bonding with job associates to investing in more enduring friendships, or from navigating the challenges of finding enduring love to casual hookups with strangers. “The pursuit of sex, which at times feels like it’s all masks, all theater, can demand so little real exposure,” writes James. “What petrified me was that I wanted more than sex from Karim: I longed to fall fully in love with him, which is much more frightening—love demands that you rest in place offstage, endure heroic passages of time together, time in which one must confront, continually, the tired, the ridiculous, the warty actor behind the role.” Cutting gay cultural clichés, the author skillfully reveals his complex inner life. Attuned to the broad expectations or struggles of being a contemporary gay male, he is also deft in his exploration of the personal and financial difficulties of anyone living in our current era.
A remarkably insightful and entertaining collection from a talented voice.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9964-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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