A funny, fierce, and bold memoir in essays.
A gay black journalist gets personal about race, religion, and sexuality in America.
Houston native Arceneaux gathers his most provocative essays to discuss how he went about “unlearning every damaging thing I’ve seen and heard about my identity.” He begins with a reflection of his childhood and his devoutly Catholic—and homophobic—home environment. Although his mother taught him about sexuality early on, his father ferociously condemned a gay uncle who died of AIDS. Fearful of being revealed as homosexual, the author spent much of his adolescence masturbating to mental images of gorgeous men while praying that “God wouldn't grab Moses’s staff and knock the shit out of me with it.” When a priest approached him about joining the priesthood, Arceneaux realized he had to come to terms with who he was. The author experimented with same-sex relationships at Howard University, but he remained mostly closeted. After taking part in a New York City gay pride parade during college, he tentatively began coming out, first to other students and then to his sister. The music of Beyoncé—his “lord and gyrator” and a woman notable for how she always “[stood] firm” in who she was as an artist and black woman—also helped him find the courage to be himself. As Arceneaux grew into his gay identity, he contemplated the nature of gay marriage, cross-racial gay attractions, and his own relationships with other black men. He attempted to write about his revelations for the media, but when he did, his (mostly white) editors saw what “[they] wanted to see” rather than the truths he attempted to communicate. Arceneaux’s essays penetrate to the heart of intersectionality to reveal personal and religious trials of faith. Together, they make a powerful statement of self-acceptance in a world much in need of lessons about diversity, tolerance, and openness.
A funny, fierce, and bold memoir in essays.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7885-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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