A great-hearted book of tenderness and brutality.
The boldly intimate memoir of an English Gypsy's struggle to define himself and his sexuality outside the bounds of traditional Romany culture.
Walsh (Gypsy Boy, 2012) grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Gypsies, where men "oozed testosterone and masculinity" and "drank, argued over women and produced sons." From the time he was a young boy, though, he knew he was different. His father wanted to transform him into a fighter worthy of the family name. However, "thrashing the stuffing" out of boys "just for the sake of some misguided sense of honour” made no sense at all. Tired of both his father's inability to accept him for what he was and of the secret sexual abuse he endured from his father's brother, Walsh ran away from home at 15. He went to live with his lover Caleb, who protected him from the Gypsy thugs his father hired to track them down. Walsh fled to Leeds and then Manchester, struggling to build a life among the "Gorgias." His relationship with Caleb did not survive, but other friends he made in the gay community helped him find his way. Against all odds, Walsh earned a college degree and also gained a coveted place at the Guildhall School of Drama in London. But he missed his family and worried for the safety of his youngest brother, who he feared would be molested by his unscrupulous uncle. Eventually, he exposed his father's brother for the predator he was. Neither Walsh's father nor his fighter-brother, however, could ever fully accept that homosexuality was part of their macho family heritage. Sadly aware that he would never be able to "go back to the family home again," Walsh nevertheless continued to love them from the new home he had made for himself outside the Gypsy community.
A great-hearted book of tenderness and brutality.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02187-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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 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
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