How one man’s resolve gave courage to others and how he turned his public outing into an important surge of activism.
A memoir from the U.S. Army soldier booed at the Republican presidential primary debate of 2011 for asking about upholding the rights of gay and lesbian soldiers.
Snyder-Hill (formerly Steve Hill) is a gay man who was deployed twice to Iraq: first, as a 20-year-old member of the active Army in 1991, when the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was in full swing; and 20 years later, as a reservist when DADT was just getting repealed. In his relentlessly forthright memoir, the Ohio native sifts through the long, emotionally arduous journey to that moment in 2011 when he allowed his identity to be used publicly in his question to Rick Santorum, knowing the “fallout” that surely would follow among his Army peers and superiors and even risking his benefits and retirement. Ultimately, however, the author decided that he could not continue to lie about such a significant part of his identity. He writes poignantly of that “darkness” inside him that he did not understand while growing up in his small Ohio town. Not able to connect romantically with girls—though he knew that his parents expected it of him—Snyder-Hill was severely closeted throughout his teens, often undergoing torments of self-loathing without understanding why. At the end of his first deployment in Iraq, nearly hit by friendly fire, he swore to himself that if he lived, he would start living life for himself. At Ohio State University, he gradually came out to friends and family. Redeployment as a reservist meant having to hide again, especially the fact of his love and marriage to partner Josh Snyder. The author effectively underscores the damage and suspicions that DADT caused and reveals the heartening and often surprisingly support he received from all directions.
How one man’s resolve gave courage to others and how he turned his public outing into an important surge of activism.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61234-697-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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