Effortlessly entertaining yet still heartfelt: the romance of life as an escape artist.
The true adventures of a drag queen named Aqua: her loves, her trials, her goldfish.
Real-life stories from the fringe seem to be the latest trend in memoirs, and Kilmer-Purcell makes a stellar debut in this genre. An art director by day (at an unnamed downtown Manhattan advertising firm that any New Yorker with a grain of sense can identify from geographical clues), by night he was a performer in drag with a distinctive specialty: water-filled fake breasts containing live goldfish. Being the fabulous creature named Aqua was actually work, the author reveals. S/he emceed at club after club, striving to be relentlessly shocking and to create a glittery, glorious, train-wreck persona that forced people to pay attention. Actually, the few hundred bucks in an envelope under the bar helped more than the attention did. Late of a typical Midwestern upbringing, Kilmer-Purcell was new to the city but couldn’t imagine himself anywhere else, no matter how awful his East Village living situation. So it was good that he met Jack and moved into a sparkling white Upper East Side penthouse in the sky. Who would leave New York under those circumstances, even though Jack paid for the place by working as a high-priced hooker? (In the book, he’s never more than one page away from having to head out the door with a backpack full of toys.) The author doesn’t try to pretend that working during the day and spending evenings at the clubs, vodka permanently attached to hand, wasn’t fun. The way he tells it, he also had a strangely perfect relationship with Jack, who didn’t allow his profession—plus attendant addictions and erratic behavior—to keep him from being a near-to-perfect boyfriend. But everything that goes up must come down, and Kilmer-Purcell meticulously records the collapse in a delicate narrative that spares not an ounce of pain but never once aims for contrition.
Effortlessly entertaining yet still heartfelt: the romance of life as an escape artist.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-081732-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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