In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments.
A gay writer reflects on his life as a single man on the prowl for sex and connection in New York City.
Oliver first moved to the city to attend college. But it wasn’t until after he graduated that he “started hooking up” with the colorful strangers he describes in this offbeat collection of wickedly humorous essays, sketches, and poems about urban life and love. Intimacy typically came in the form of one-night stands with men he found on Internet websites like Manhunt or mobile apps like “Grindr, Scruff, and Tindr.” The men—like the married lawyer from Connecticut, the “Broadway understudy under whom [he] studied for a night,” or the Australian flight attendant with a fetish for dressing up as a dolphin—were as unique as they were transient. When Oliver wasn’t scoring dates or sexting with men online or handing out his telephone number to the “bartenders, waiters and merchandise managers at Broadway musicals,” he was busy fantasizing about hot men on the subway. Hit-and-run as his relationships were, Oliver did occasionally think about marriage. Yet when he or his sex partners tried to communicate a desire for closeness, neither side could respond with complete acceptance. When the author tried to kiss a neighborhood hookup, the man “pulled away [and] smiled politely.” When a hockey player began calling Oliver out of loneliness and despair over being diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, Oliver could only listen and offer no comfort. Only after a sexless encounter with another gay writer at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire did the author finally find an unacknowledged mirror for himself and his actions. The writer had plenty of opportunities for sex but not “plenty of people to confide in, people to feel close to”—just like Oliver himself, who was caught in the ceaselessly carnival-esque flow of big-city life.
In-your-face funny but with surprisingly moving moments.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4666-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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