Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a...
Ruminations on life, love, and lesbian subcultures.
In her first book-length nonfiction (her work also appears in Out magazine and online at LesbiaNation.com), novelist Williams (Girl Walking Backwards, 1998) starts with her drive to a nightclub holding a Trash Disco Night. The goings-on are appropriately depraved and less than logical, peripherally involving Williams’s non-obsessive non-relationship with a gorgeous submissive named Anikka. The text moves on to other topics, but in a sense never quite leaves the nightclub. Like most members of her early-30s generation, the writer is impressively grounded in pop and underground culture; the highlight here is her visit to Ladyfest, a riotgrrl music/political awareness festival in Olympia, Washington. Wandering among the testy mix of young hippie women and overly fashion-conscious punk chicks, Williams gets antsy at just how hard it is to get laid in this achingly PC landscape: “The phrase ‘identity politics’ makes me want to become a heroin addict. I have dents in my wall from hurling books by bell hooks.” There’s a lot more in that vein: slashing attacks on the stifling attitudes of her lesbian nation that are yet leavened with a desperate, passionate love. (Perhaps you can only truly critique what you adore.) The author’s intelligent, self-deprecating manner allows her to pull off pretty much anything, from reflecting on her relationship with a teenaged girl—oh-so-improper, she knows—to rhapsodizing about the wrestling parties she hosts for her friends involving a real wrestling mat and lots of vegetable oil.
Somewhere in the midst of all the post-slacker knocking about, Williams comes up with a smart, breezy chronicle about a smart, breezy woman who’s game for just about anything and has something sharp to say all the time.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-785-9
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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