Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.
A real-life Alex Portnoy tells of a childhood penchant for masturbating in public.
The combination of comedic Jewish coming-of-age story and masturbation can’t help but conjure up images of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In Bayme’s debut memoir, the masturbation in question is done by a much younger lad and is a strange combination of introverted self-pleasuring and unintentional exhibitionism referred to as “rocking.” In fact, his first lustful encounter occurred at the age of 6, when he dreamed of tasting the scrumptious wares at his local Dunkin' Donuts, which was strictly forbidden by the edicts of his orthodox Jewish faith. “All I wanted were the simplest pleasures the world had to offer,” writes the author, “but life is unfair when you are a six-year-old Jewish boy.” Whether such statements are honest or ironic is anyone’s guess, but regardless, Bayme goes on to recall the childhood travails of a young kid from the Bronx who rubbed up against inanimate objects at school and at home. He then used pornography to prepare himself for hypothetical sexual contact with a girl. The humor is light and airy and rarely comes off as anything other than confessional dirty talk. “In my imagination,” he writes, “I was King Fuck, who charmed legions of women in the field and town squares before bedding many of them in my silk-festooned chambers.” Once he went as far as he could go with imaginary sexual encounters, in high school, Bayme finally obtained the girl of his dreams. He dropped her, however, when she couldn’t compete with his fantasies. After the first few chapters, the narrative begins to sound like every other boring recollection of growing up and experimenting with forbidden things like drugs and girlie magazines. The Jewish angle gives it some niche potential, but this is routine stuff.
Fails to add anything transcendent to the canon of sexual-coming-of-age memoirs.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06722-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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