Whitaker’s flaccid memoir of life as a gay male prostitute denies the reader even the giddy thrill of voyeurism in service of an existential life lesson which even Sartre would have decried as banal. Whitaker begins with the reason he began hustling: spite toward an ex-boyfriend. After such a startlingly shallow admission, the reader is off on a roller-coaster ride of cheap sex at high prices. Whitaker describes tricks and encounters with men, men, and more men—neurotic psychologists, horny doctors, businessmen from out of town, Broadway composers, even a celebrity whose identity he protects. We travel with him to the penthouses of New York’s elite for all-night orgies of sex, drug use, and debauchery. One of Whitaker’s chief concerns—will he be able to “perform” with men to whom he isn’t attracted?—offers a big clue to the failure of the book: if he wasn’t interested in what he was doing, why should the reader be? Interspersed with these recollections of the trials of life as an odalisque are existential ruminations on life, love, sex, and identity. Whitaker trudges out various philosophers and authors—including Wittgenstein, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and Thoreau—more to prove that he’s college educated than to ponder the meaning of life as a hustler. His journal entries, which feature such detours as his maudlin commentary on actress Tallulah Bankhead and a reading list (Sontag and Shakespeare), bog down any narrative thrust he might have developed into a great slurping sound of self-absorption. Whitaker has apparently learned a life lesson through his experiences as a prostitute, and he’s obviously writing for some sort of emotional purgation; however, such a catharsis would be better achieved on a psychiatrist’s couch rather than boring the reader with sex so dull and journeys of self-discovery so morose.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1999
ISBN: 1-56858-123-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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