Fascinating reading, especially for fans of 20th-century science fiction.
A science-fiction novelist and late-blooming gay activist remembers his long and colorful life.
Robinson (1926-2014) grew up in Depression-era Chicago, one of five boys in a loveless marriage of convenience, and he had his first sexual experience at 13 with his stepbrother. Yet it would be years before the author could say that he had acted on his own homosexual impulses. Not wanting to be labeled a “faggot” or “queer,” he spent the rest of his adolescence as a miserable celibate. After a stint in the Navy, he went to Beloit College, where he discovered his two lifelong passions: science and writing. After a second tour of military duty during the Korean War, he went to Northwestern University to study journalism while privately berating himself for not being attracted to women. His first adult (and very humiliating) sexual encounter occurred several years later after he had undergone psychotherapy and become a regular in Chicago’s underground gay scene. In the meantime, Robinson worked at Science Digest and later at men’s magazines like Rogue and Cavalier, meeting such sci-fi luminaries as Harlan Ellison and Robert Heinlein along the way. Eventually, he found his way to another “skin book, Playboy, where he “scurried…into the safety of the closet” at work and led a second gay life that, post-Stonewall, became harder to conceal. The success of his thriller, The Glass Inferno, later made into the 1974 film The Towering Inferno, allowed Robinson to leave his magazine work and write full-time in San Francisco. Drawn into the ferment of gay political activism, he wrote speeches for the soon-to-be-slain city supervisor, Harvey Milk. Soon afterward, he became a firsthand witness to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Vivid and detailed, Robinson’s story is an engaging recollection of the golden age of pulp fiction interwoven with the story of a man’s successful struggle to accept himself.
Fascinating reading, especially for fans of 20th-century science fiction.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8209-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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