A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely...
Part travelogue, part history, and part literary analysis, this book pleasantly meanders through the lives of foreigners who have, over the centuries, decamped to the little island of Capri to find sexual and artistic freedom.
Indonesia-based arts writer James (The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic, 2016, etc.) makes the convincing case that “since antiquity, Capri has been a hedonistic dreamland, a place where the rules do not apply: a Mediterranean prototype of Las Vegas.” This “limestone rock four square miles in extent,” far enough off the coast of Italy to make for dangerous travel before the 20th century, attracted Roman emperors looking for scenery, peace, and sensual pleasures. The author carefully untangles the various stories about Tiberius, portrayed by some as a “paranoid, bloodthirsty monarch, driven by perverted lust” and by others as a wise ruler in search of solitude, and settles on a middle ground between the two. After Rome, James dashes through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period during which a wide range of writers found their ways to Capri and started writing about each other in a kind of literary hall of mirrors. Many moved there to avoid persecution for homosexuality at home; others, to indulge in sex with children and adolescents. One of those with “a mania for young boys” was novelist Norman Douglas. Though little known now, he was the author of the bestselling South Wind, from which this book derives its title. As James roams around the island taking in mansions built by wealthy expatriates, he also examines the lives and works of lesser-known Capri novelists, such as the flamboyant Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, an admirer of “trashy romantic fiction,” in whose work “nuance is easily lost amid the dense classical allusions, perfumed tropes, and extravagant homages to adolescent flesh.”
A colorful, captivating literary companion for those visiting the island and a peek into the lives of some figures largely faded from history.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-14276-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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