A brassy, forthright autobiography from the flamboyant, cross- dressing black diva made famous by John Berendt's bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. As Berendt's admiring introduction notes, The Lady Chablis is a legal name, adopted as much for copyright protection as to define her identity. That's typical of the savvy, self-promoting Grand Empress of Savannah: She bills herself as a performance artist rather than as a drag queen. Controlling perceptions of herself (and generally getting her way) is a top priority for the willful Chablis. Labels having always been an issue, she prefers to name herself. Chablis's talent emerged early; she started performing in drag at age 14. Her defiant embrace of femininity earned beatings from her abusive parents but acceptance from small-town Florida neighbors. Chablis candidly relates a string of professional and personal troubles, including struggles with drugs and alcohol, battles with unscrupulous club owners, and a series of unsatisfactory romances; her honesty provides substance beneath the sass. Like her nightclub act, which evolved from lip-synching disco tunes to politically charged monologues, her life, as she comes to see it, is about the struggle to find a voice and to gain respect. After she's arrested for the possession of drugs (she has to explain why she calls herself Brenda Knox when her driver's license says that she is Benjamin Knox, her birth name), Chablis confronts the question of how to force the world to accept her as a woman. She considers but rejects sex-change surgery, opting instead to be her outrageous self without giving up her ``candy.'' She remains a preoperative transsexual, a clinical definition that answers the most tiresome question directed at her but inadequately describes the verve and boldness with which she has lived her life and recounts it here (aided by freelance writer Bouloukos). A funny, combative walk on the wild side, told with tremendous heart and charm. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-52094-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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