by Felice Picano ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2007
Picano recalls an exciting time with insight, enthusiasm and justifiable satisfaction.
A writer who was there and did all that chronicles perhaps the most significant period in the history of gay literature.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969 sent gay writers, artists and actors from their closets to their desks, studios and theaters. There for the next 30 or so years they created a body of candid, forthright, often laudatory works about gay life. One of the most prolific of them, Picano (Fred in Love, 2005, etc.) here recalls what happened. The theme is sex: sex as politics, sex as literature, sex as just plain sex. When Picano spotted a tattoo of a seahorse (a male that reproduces) on the bod of a buff Italian man gleaming in the Key West sun, he got the name for the gay press he started in 1976. Five years later, he joined with two other publishers of gay works to form Gay Presses of New York. With six gay writers he formed the short-lived but influential Violet Quill Club. Picano’s history of all this is rich with anecdotes, profiles and background notes. He captures the excitement of a Violet Quill reading at Manhattan’s Three Lives & Company Bookstore. He traces the development of Harvey Fierstein’s Torchsong Trilogy, the play that propelled gay theater into the mainstream and, in book form, helped keep Gay Presses of New York solvent. And he describes authors famous (Gore Vidal) and unknown (the Rev. Boyd McDonald, who wrote scorching accounts of his sexual adventures). Picano’s own adventures feed into the story. After Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Picano’s genitals, the men had sex. The freedom to do that, then write and publish the story, is what his book is all about.
Picano recalls an exciting time with insight, enthusiasm and justifiable satisfaction.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78671-813-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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