A vivid and dramatic slice of adolescence.
Reflections on growing up goth and gay in Texas at the dawn of the 1990s—based on the author’s one-man show.
As a gay teenager in Texas, writer and performer Crabb suffered the abuse of having his head smashed with encyclopedias and enduring hate speeches from his classmates. By the time he entered high school, the author’s denial of his sexuality was tested when he began listening to George Michael’s “Faith” and was introduced to Interview magazine, with its glossy, artful spreads of male models. Suddenly, the message that seemingly everyone else around him had received made sense to Crabb, yet he persisted in repressing his feelings, despite his first crush on the mysterious new student named Greg. To make matters more confusing, he came of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic and hysteria, when “you couldn’t watch MTV for more than ten minutes without hearing about AIDS.” Crabb’s gradual sexual awakening and comfort with his own identity coincided with his friendship with Greg, who also admitted to being gay. Together, the two acclimated themselves to the “freak” crowd, circulating in the teen club scene around San Antonio and excessive experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Their friendship forms the backbone of Crabb’s narrative, as each relied on the other to help understand his identity in the face of intolerance and violence. Though the author’s story wonderfully captures the awkwardness, strife, and even terror of his experience as a gay teen, it is also upbeat, endearing, and achingly funny. (The mall-rat generation will be especially at home with Crabb.) The author experienced all the highs and lows of adolescence, from the reckless pleasures of youth to the inevitable distance and loneliness of outgrowing relationships.
A vivid and dramatic slice of adolescence.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237128-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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