In a richly allusive and imaginative portrait, Schmidgall (Literature as Opera and Shakespeare as Opera) analyzes the aspects of Oscar Wilde's life, character, reputation, and performance as a gay man living in the closing decade of the 19th century from the perspective of contemporary, post-Stonewall gay culture. Charming illustrations and apt quotes from Punch, Wilde himself, his friends and enemies, and historical and literary figures from Catullus to Joyce Carol Oates view Wilde from myriad perspectives, illuminating what he was (tall, fashionable, quotable) and how he appeared (a fallen angel or devil, effete or refined, pariah or hero), a paradox who loved paradoxes. Schmidgall shows him in various roles: Socrates and Hamlet, martyr and tragic hero, acrobat, clown, trespasser, aesthete, a reflection of his mother, an abysmal husband, a neglectful father, the perennial child writing fairy tales, and, for lack of a term for homosexual, an ``ass-thete,'' pederast, seducer who liked young men without hair from the lower classes. Schmidgall traces the legal history behind Wilde's ``crime,'' his sexual practices, his friends, and his decision to face a trial rather than escape—one of the first self-outings, a Socratic confrontation. In a clever chapter he compares Wilde's ideas to Neitzsche's transgressive philosophy against conventional morality. Similarly, he offers an extended analysis of the ``sublime'' and Shakespearean dimensions of Wilde's ``tragedy,'' raising him to an heroic level. Wilde's ``sin,'' he concludes, became the basis of a new civilization, a civilization in which, if he still survived, he would live in San Francisco working as a book commentator, staunchly PC, a feminist, reviling the vulgarity of contemporary celebrities and the inadequate responses to AIDS. Most likely, he would also applaud this book, a fanciful and operatic production.
Pub Date: April 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93763-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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