by S. Stanley Gordon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2011
An instant classic of its kind (i.e., Christopher’s kind) and required reading for inquisitive young queers, dyspeptic old...
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An erudite charmer documents his ongoing adventures in love and culture through 80-plus years “in the life”—from Rittenhouse Square to London’s West End.
First-time author Gordon’s breezy autobiography begins with a caution to the reader: “If concepts like Hopeless Romantic, Love at First Sight or Head Over Heels make you nauseous, this book is definitely not for you.” Born to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrants in 1920s Philadelphia, Gordon, née Samuel Grodsky, knew early on that he was different; after unrequited crushes on neighbor boys and desperate trips to the library to read Havelock Ellis, the amiable young man ambles into what would eventually become a lucrative career in optometry and a truly amazing life story. He marries, divorces, dabbles and dithers, marries again, has a son and eventually realizes he’s gay. Then the fun begins; cruising, swank Hollywood parties, lots of sex, the pursuit of love (a recurring theme), glamorous midcentury gay New York, Broadway semitriumphs and tragedies, lots more sex and love (with the titular husbands) and a graceful slide into vigorous middle age and beyond. The book chronicles Gordon’s long and mostly absurdly happy life to date with stylish candor and humility. His engaging prose is chatty without being catty, and sexy without being sleazy; better still, he tells his tale of fabulousness without resorting to the bland narcissism that sully many memoirs—especially the happy ones. There’s no false modesty, but neither is there boasting or gratuitous name-dropping. Even when he dishes on celebs such as Tallulah Bankhead or Lawrence Harvey, it’s more wittily self-deprecating than vicious. Gordon’s is a fascinating life, and his boundless joy at his good fortune is genuine—and contagious. The only thing his book lacks is pictures.
An instant classic of its kind (i.e., Christopher’s kind) and required reading for inquisitive young queers, dyspeptic old conservatives and just about anyone who has a heart.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0982998786
Page Count: 287
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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