Dark and difficult, but sometimes life is like that, and sometimes we need to be reminded.
A gritty look at what it’s like to be young, black, gay, alienated and diseased.
Light-skinned with cascading curls, African-American Lofton had been described as “pretty” for as long as he could recall. It wasn’t easy being a pretty boy, and once he realized he was gay, he found it even harder to feel comfortable in mainstream society. His skin color and homosexuality complicated every aspect of his life. After being sexually hyperactive as a young man, Lofton was diagnosed with HIV in 1993. That prompted him to launch a nonstop hunt for the treasures of love, health and acceptance. A freelance writer, former P.R. flack and gay activist, Lofton pulls no punches in his debut. In one instance he describes his father as a “cock hound,” in another he characterizes his stepmother as “a female version of Verdine White of Earth Wind & Fire” (anyone who’s seen Verdine knows that’s a harsh dig). He has no problem relating his sexual history in explicit detail, from how he learned to masturbate to near-pornographic accounts of trysts with lovers. This honesty is at once impressive and painful, most notably when he unflinchingly discusses his suicide attempt and a sexual assault at the hands of a stranger he had invited into his house. Stories like his don’t necessarily end neatly, and neither does the book, but Lofton’s work within the gay community and to raise AIDS awareness speaks for itself. Similar in content to Shawn Decker’s outstanding My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure (2006), Lofton’s memoir isn’t quite as engaging a read, but it’s fiercely compelling in its own way.
Dark and difficult, but sometimes life is like that, and sometimes we need to be reminded.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59309-123-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Strebor/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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