A timely, artfully written memoir of one man's war.
Art historian and critic Lord (Mythic Giacometti, 2004, etc.) recounts his life as a gay GI in World War II.
The author presents himself as utterly ordinary, “average of height, weight, build, unremarkable, in short, in every outward aspect.” That unremarkable nature proved useful, for Lord was living a dangerous life in those days—and, as he notes, even today, “parents in Dallas, Dijon, or Dar es Salaam hardly hope that their kids will grow up to live in sin with same-sex partners.” Understanding his own inclinations early on, Lord shipped out to the European theater in various combat-support roles. An intelligent writer capable of holding a conversation in French, he found himself interviewing and processing displaced persons. Moreover, no thanks to the interventions of a sympathetic colonel with a penchant for calling him “baby,” he also earned a reputation for having “a unique faculty for antagonizing your superiors,” as one officer growls. Lord recounts scrapes with GIs who were progressive in all ways but the amatory. Of more interest to cultural historians, he relates travels through wartime France that afforded him meetings with Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, the latter two confessing a fondness for Ulysses S. Grant. (“We quite prefer him to Lincoln,” Miss Toklas pronounced.) The author writes with occasional archness, much irony and good humor, but this is no Catch-22. By his account, which takes many dark turns, it is clear that he and other gay soldiers on the battlefield did as much as anyone to win the war.
A timely, artfully written memoir of one man's war.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-21748-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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