American expatriate Green records searing conflicts between heart and spirit as he finally comes to recognize his sexual identity in this third volume of autobiography (The Green Paradise, 1992; The War at Sixteen, 1993). Though born and raised in France, Green was filled by his American parents with tales of family history and Southern lore. So, arriving on these shores in 1919, Green felt instinctively at home, especially in the South. In old family residences in Virginia and Savannah he met relatives, viewed treasured memorabilia, and savored the distinctively southern ethics his parents had imbued in him. But as a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Green was less sure of his place. Though only 19, he had fought in WW I, his sensibility and tastes were European, and he missed France; but, he admits, looking out over Charlottesville on his first morning, ``devoted as I was to France, I recognized that a part of me had no other origin than the country in which I now found myself.'' Shy and self-conscious, Green at first avoided his fellow students and concentrated instead on his classes and spiritual growth. A devout convert to Catholicism, he considered becoming a priest, but he was also agonizingly conscious of his intense attraction to young men. And his unsparing recollections of his sexual ignorance, his desperate attempts to subsume his feelings in religious practice, and his growing awareness of the existence of others like him, make this volume a remarkable record of self-discovery. Finally able to befriend- -platonically—his beloved Mark, who ``reappears constantly'' in his later writings, Green finds a measure of contentment before returning to France. Self-portrait of the artist as a young man, rendered with an excoriating candor that makes Green such a master and exemplar of the confessional voice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-7145-2987-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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