by Frank Winchester ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2012
A clumsy, heartfelt portrait of a lively, self-destructive subculture in the gay community and a charismatic individual who...
A memoir of life as a gay man in Cincinnati from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Winchester, a late-in-life author, intersperses this thin volume with repetitive musings about homosexuality, stating that it’s natural and that most people, masculine or feminine, have both hetero- and homosexual desires. Either way, homosexuals should be respected as “fully human,” even if they happen to choose poor lifestyles independent of their sexual orientation. At the heart of the book are the men who collected around Chad—a church musician, child molestation victim and promiscuous social butterfly. Some of these promiscuous men used female names and, in the days before AIDS was a concern, even paid each other, or heterosexually-identified men in need of cash, for loveless sex. The writing, although not flowery, is explicit with the crude language—characters are “screwed in the mouth,” “screwed in the anus,” or they’re “blowing numerous men”—although it’s not intended to arouse. In fact, Winchester’s slightly prudish opinion of his peers’ behavior is generally disapproving; he simultaneously seems to aim for an authentic though negative chronicle of gay life as he experienced it, while pushing for a humanistic, positive view of gays and lesbians as people. Winchester glosses over his own behavior in his writing, which is often founded on a facile moralization of sexuality. “The Mermaid and the Centaur”—his love poem to Chad that concludes the memoir—frames this book not as a social history, or even a cautionary tale, but rather as an extended, loving tribute to a frustrating yet beloved friend and partner.
A clumsy, heartfelt portrait of a lively, self-destructive subculture in the gay community and a charismatic individual who personified it.Pub Date: April 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470173708
Page Count: 116
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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