An entertaining and thoughtful book about a remarkable life that consistently embraced transformation.
A posthumous memoir from the multimedia artist, a "transgender icon” who transcended more than mere gender categories.
P-Orridge, who died from leukemia in 2020, was born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, England, in 1950. Considering their birth name a "temporary tag," P-Orridge believed that a name change was "a really potent form of magic.” Their overriding goal in a lifetime of art- and music-making was to "short-circuit control," a directive given to them by William Burroughs. The author’s early years in British schools, where they suffered from verbal and physical abuse from classmates and authority figures alike, "taught me who my enemy was." Their early experiments in performance art and street theater set the tone for their career: “Does anything have to exist just because it did before?...Who does it serve?” Throbbing Gristle, the seminal industrial band P-Orridge co-founded, used "the tools and the toys of the military-industrial complex" as musical instruments to subvert “their original intent, which was, of course, control.” Confounding expectations, the author’s next band, Psychic TV, aimed to “seduce the audience rather than alienate them.” Using esoteric rituals, fetish objects, sacred figures, and shamanic tools, their music conjured spiritual states and aimed to "make the occult trendy again.” For another conceptual art project, P-Orridge served as one half—with dominatrix and partner Lady Jaye Breyer—of a "pandrogyne" fusing male and female beings into a "third being,” a further breakdown of the binary model. They erased differences between them with body modifications and medical techniques, applying cut-up methods to "our problematic bodies.” They considered this project the "egalitarian integration of two artist explorers, this third being Breyer P-Orridge," a proposed "end of either/or" that is "essential to the survival of the species." As much a manifesto as a memoir, this wild life story is dedicated to the breakdown of categories: "End gender. Break sex. Destroy the control of DNA and the expected. Every man and woman is a man and woman.”
An entertaining and thoughtful book about a remarkable life that consistently embraced transformation.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4386-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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