A captivating chronicle driven by keen wit, a strong sense of place, and a clear love of a city’s old soul.
A dynamic memoir of life during lockdown in New York City.
Through a series of essays, writer and psychotherapist Moss shares his experiences as a transgender man during the quarantine period. In the 1990s, writes the author, he ran to the city “to be free and find my people.” However, over the past 25 years, the city has changed drastically, a process the author examined insightfully and ruefully in Vanishing New York. During this time, he writes, the “New People” took over, and they “are the same everywhere, colonizing cities with a mass-produced, globalized state of mind.” From inside his small apartment in the East Village, he watched as New People moved in, looking “like a J. Crew catalog, ultra-white and monied, everything new and polished, not a speck of human messiness.” However, on March 16, 2020, Moss awoke to a ghost town, and the city began to feel like its old, chaotic self. The piles of Amazon packages subsided, music played in the streets again, and parks began rewilding. For years, Moss recalls, he felt invisible, so he tried to blend in and look normal. When the pandemic set in, however, “the streets were reclaimed by the Blacks, the queers, the socialists, the freaks,” and the author was moved to participate in Black Lives Matter and other protests. Eventually, though, people began feeling powerless, and riots and looting began increasing in frequency. With raw emotion and spot-on sociological portraits, Moss ponders the reasons why “I feel such relief in the turbulence of the disorderly city.” As the pandemic has dragged on, more and more people express the desire to want things to get “back to normal,” whatever that means. “Normal is the last thing I want to go back to,” writes the author. With the city returning to so-called “normal,” writes Moss, “the streets become remarkably whiter,” and “an obliterating sameness” resumes.
A captivating chronicle driven by keen wit, a strong sense of place, and a clear love of a city’s old soul.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-86847-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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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