A satisfying success story from a reliably outspoken raconteur.
The bestselling author is back with a chronicle of his exasperating love life in New York City following addiction and recovery.
In his latest autobiographical story, Burroughs (This Is How, 2012, etc.) traces his frustrating track record with men and eternal search for true love in the big city. He opens with a break in his long-held sobriety in the mid-1990s, during which he landed a date with Mitch, a “deeply odd,” gay writer—in fact, the author of one of Burroughs’ “favorite books.” They fell for each other quickly and entered into an up-and-down relationship. At the beginning of the book, the author intersperses these episodes with snippets of history from his early life in advertising in Boston and driving cross-country to San Francisco. A love affair with a man named George followed, but George’s death, which introduces the book’s commanding center section, threw Burroughs into a drunken spiral of bed-wetting and compulsive QVC gem-buying marathons, which inspired his 2000 novel Sellevision. Romantic feelings for Christopher, his agent at the time, derailed when Christopher divulged his HIV-positive status. The deflated author then went on a dating spree with men who weren’t “medically off limits.” Throughout, Burroughs is hypercritical of his love interests—e.g., the fine lines around Mitch’s eyes gave him a “ravaged by time” look. Some readers may find that the author’s early impressions of dating someone with AIDS are insensitive. However, he writes colorfully of his time with “normal and stable” Dennis, with whom he had a powerful yet different kind of relationship “because I was sober and actually experiencing it”; the relationship waxed and waned through passion, conflict, disillusionment, and an eventual separation. An admittance of his undeniable love for Christopher, who had since battled cancer but was game for the challenge of loving the writer unconditionally, opens the third part of this serpentine dating memoir, which ends with bright beams of contentment and happiness.
A satisfying success story from a reliably outspoken raconteur.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-34203-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
PROFILES
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
