Sociology taken to the streets and basements, yielding a well-wrought introduction to a scene little known—and perhaps...
An engaging, if unlikely, memoir of a scholar by day, club hopper by night.
Corona is many things: a sociologist at NYU, a dreamer (in the sense of both having parents who were illegal immigrants from Mexico and having large ambitions), a gay Latino, and both a worshiper and student of celebrity. He combines all these interests and attributes in this spry memoir of New York nightlife, the bouncer-at-the-gate demimonde of loud discos and flowing drink and drug. As he writes, he is almost alone in chronicling the scene as a scholar: there have been a few who have parachuted in for a quick look and just a couple of other participant observers, including a former runway model who “accessed situations and had conversations that a big-nosed, non-white queer man like me simply couldn’t.” Inspired to come to NYC by the antics of the so-called Club Kids movement of the early 1990s, a whirlwind of outrageous behavior and costumes that ended in a morass of pharmaceuticals and murder, Corona exults in “the eventual education I would get downtown: the complicated yet very malleable nature of human identity.” Put on a costume or a wig, that is, and you become a different person—but in the club scene, you are who you want to be, whatever personality or gender you wish, and by Corona’s account, no one is particularly interested in the truth. Though written by a scholar, there are only a few nods to academic niceties here. The only obligatory moment seems to be a somewhat glancing history of the club scene as refracted through the pioneers at Andy Warhol’s Factory, whose escapades are well-documented elsewhere. Yet even Corona’s nods to those pioneers are lively, as with his homage to Susanne Bartsch, whose “pronounced Swiss German accent is a harsh flourish that only adds dramatic bite to her already expressive character, one that incarnates fabulousness.”
Sociology taken to the streets and basements, yielding a well-wrought introduction to a scene little known—and perhaps little imagined—to outsiders.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-939-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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