A brief history, sad and dismal, of a dishonest cross-dresser who achieved a bit of fleeting notoriety.
Wheen (Idiot Proof, 2004, etc.) investigates the life of Dr. Charlotte Bach, whom a coterie of learned Londoners took, for a while at least, to have outsmarted Darwin and Freud.
Charlotte Bach was, in fact, Karoly Hajdu (1920–81), a con man who, even after a close shave, was not a very good-looking lady. As Bach, Hajdu offered clever Britons an inscrutable new theory, suggesting that “sexual deviation operated as the mainspring of evolution.” Before assuming the persona of the big woman, Hajdu, late of Budapest, was an autodidact who sometimes enjoyed being a girl. He devoted much of his life to the growing addiction after debtors’ prison and the death of a wife (from whom he inherited a nice wardrobe). Smart, self-aggrandizing Hajdu progressed from a cosmopolite boulevardier, complete with goatee and monocle, playing on the English attraction to titled folk. He dubbed himself baron and count. He lied about being a university lecturer and a military officer. He was, rather, a feckless Paddington estate agent and a thieving fundraiser. Using a variety of names and invented credentials, he practiced sex therapy and hypnotism. He wrote autobiographical case studies and novels. The role of dominatrix paid the rent. But cross-dressing was a crime, liable to cause a breach of the peace, much to the worry of the transvestite community off whom the artist sponged. The story of Hadju, who affected false fronts literally and figuratively, will be, perhaps, of most interest to the special congregation of men who express their feminine side in dress. Dr. Bach, incidentally, never won the Nobel Prize she expected.
A brief history, sad and dismal, of a dishonest cross-dresser who achieved a bit of fleeting notoriety.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-904095-74-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Short Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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