A diverse group of writers, academics, physicians, and social activists reflect, with varying levels of insight and eloquence, on the career of playwright and AIDS provocator Larry Kramer. Mass (Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America, 1994), a friend of Kramer's and a cofounder with him and several others of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), edits this collection of essays by 23 contributors, including playwright Tony Kushner, book editor Michael Denneny, and former GMHC director Rodger McFarlane. Their different backgrounds illustrate the mix of themes in Kramer's own life. Patrick Merla introduces readers to Kramer's major public achievements: the film Women in Love, which Kramer produced; his novel, Faggots; his plays, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me; AIDS organizations GMHC and Act-Up. The scope of Kramer's life and work is not so large that this collection can escape being wearisomely repetitive. The best essays relate a focused piece of Kramer's life, politics, or art to a broader framework, such as the history of gay theater, the African-American community, heterosexual families, or W.H. Auden's poetry (in pieces by Michael Paller, Canaan Parker, Sarah Trillin, and Alfred Corn, respectively). In an elegiac essay, Andrew Holleran reflects on the gay artist's world of the past 20 years, and Kramer's successful negotiation within it of the writer's block that is AIDS. Kramer himself has the last word, in an interview that closes the book, leaving the reader with a sense of his genuine, if conflicted, humanity. Tributes to those still living run the risk of grandiosity, to which the long collection sometimes succumbs; all but fervent admirers of Kramer's should read selectively.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17704-6
Page Count: 405
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
