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ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST

Name: ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST
Author: Steven Gaines
ISBN: 978-1-883285-69-2

by Steven Gaines ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A spirited narrative of a hard-won coming-of-age.

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The story of the author’s experiences of transformation in a famed mental hospital.

In the early 1960s, after a failed suicide attempt, Gaines (Fool’s Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach, 2009, etc.), at 15, became a patient at the Payne Whitney in Manhattan, where Marilyn Monroe, Carson McCullers, William S. Burroughs, Robert Lowell, and other notables had been treated. In a candid, entertaining memoir, the author chronicles growing up gay and confused in Borough Park, “the cognac of Brooklyn, the potent and flavorful essence”; dealing with his father’s rage, teenage crushes, and strange compulsions; and landing at the storied hospital where fellow patients included producer Richard Halliday, husband of actress Mary Martin; a raunchy, eccentric contessa; and a woman who claimed to be John F. Kennedy’s spurned mistress. Gaines was put under the care of a psychiatrist to whom he finally confided the cause of his distress: “I THINK I AM A HOMOSEXUAL,” he wrote in a sealed note. “Homosexuality can be cured, like many other disorders,” his doctor told him, news that buoyed Gaines’ spirits. “I would jump through hoops of fire,” he thought, “if I could be normal.” Although the path to heterosexuality eluded him at Payne Whitney and through 12 years of Freudian therapy, Gaines changed radically. Under the mentorship of the moody Halliday, who imparted Broadway gossip; the spurned mistress, who prescribed for him new clothes from Brooks Brothers and a spiffy hairstyle; and Martin’s suggested reading list (including To Kill a Mockingbird and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gaines left behind his provincial Brooklyn roots. “I felt like Eliza Doolittle at the psycho country club,” he writes. “Maybe it was a ship of crazies, but I had embarked on a voyage where almost anything was possible.” In this short memoir, the author vividly portrays the crazies both within and outside of the mental hospital.

A spirited narrative of a hard-won coming-of-age.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-883285-69-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Delphinium

Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
by Peter Brown & Steven Gaines

- BOOK REVIEW
FOOL’S PARADISE
by Steven Gaines

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THE SKY’S THE LIMIT
by Steven Gaines

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)