Frantic and overdone, but strangely honest rantings from a modern-day Genet.
Hellion’s diary of a troubled life as hunter and despiser of men.
Lunch, a musician, writer and photographer, was a grimy and dark princess during drug-haunted Manhattan’s nihilistic No Wave movement of the early ’80s. Here she recounts time spent amidst the artists, scenesters, druggies and occasional murderers who made up acquaintance. Lunch was spurred to sexual aggression by a childhood of abuse in upstate New York, and later into nympho-maniacal behavior and rampant drugging. “New York City did not corrupt me,” she writes. “I was drawn to it because I had already been corrupted.” She hated men but flung herself at them, the worse the better. Reproducing the pathology of abuse, the cycle of pain received and inflicted, she grabbed and discarded with abandon, making a specialty of deflowering 14-year-old boys. The pell-mell prose gives the book an immediacy that’s hard to shake, and Lunch’s headlong plunge into manic devastation and corruption at times recalls the better work of William S. Burroughs. No wonder that Hubert Selby Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, was a mentor of sorts to this evil angel of extremes. As Sonic Youth front-man Thurston Moore (another No Wave vet) puts it in his blank verse afterword, “She can lure fascist beasts to honey with a whiff of her thigh. She can eviscerate them in their own hideous pools of selfish shame.”
Frantic and overdone, but strangely honest rantings from a modern-day Genet.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933354-35-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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