Showoff memoirs of an artist whose works stirred controversy during the Beat era and have been increasingly ignored ever since. Perhaps nostalgic for the days when he was regarded as the enfant terrible of painting, Rivers offers a reminiscence remarkable only for its tastelessness and lack of insight. Rivers recounts in numbing detail his sexual conquests (male and female), his halfhearted efforts to kick a heroin habit, and his self-proclaimed triumphs as a jazz hipster. He also discusses at length his problems with premature ejaculation and later with the adjustments necessary when his erect penis begins to look ``like a J-shaped sausage''—the result of a rare case of Peyronie's Syndrome. Meanwhile, Rivers's attitude toward women is porcine at best, and one of the unexplained mysteries here is just what his assorted wives and lovers seemingly found irresistible in his posturings. Many pages are devoted to Rivers's longtime relationship with Frank O'Hara, the early gay poet and ringmaster of the New York Abstract Expressionist circus. Here, the author displays a depth of feeling largely missing elsewhere. During a kind of summing-up, Rivers comes close to championing the proposition that women who have been raped probably were ``asking for it,'' though he is sensitive enough to admit ``that no one should be screwed against their will.'' Such aperáus aside, those interested in clues to Rivers's creative processes will be disappointed. From the evidence here, he seems to have had little, if any, cohesive artistic purpose. The kind of personal account that gives chutzpah a bad name. (Sixteen pages of color photographs—not seen; b&w illustrations throughout.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-019007-8
Page Count: 500
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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