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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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