Keenly observed and well-written—readers will hope that a sequel is forthcoming.
A small-town lad’s awakening, sexual and intellectual—which takes him to big-city demimondes and books that begged, in their day, to be banned.
An autobiographical memoir? Rechy may be thinking of Kenneth Rexroth’s “autobiographical novel,” or perhaps recent memoirs that turn out to be fictions and fictions that turn out to be memoirs. (Before the story begins, the author notes, “This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection.”) Of mixed Scottish and Mexican descent, Rechy grew up in 1940s Texas, where the ethnic combination would mean segregation. But he was always taken for white, which got him in the good high school and even landed him a steamy encounter with his journalism teacher. Rechy’s good fortunes would not be met by his more obviously Hispanic kin: “Although other families in El Paso had struggled out of extreme poverty to moderate poverty during the war,” he writes, “ours seemed entrenched.” With few prospects and another war to fight, Rechy found himself in the army, where, improbably, he met among his fellow soldiers writers, directors, producers and publishers who encouraged his writing and, in some instances, his newly discovered homosexuality and the soul-searching it occasioned (“I’m not queer, man, I’m straight”). A soft job as an aide to a colonel anxiously awaiting advancement—“My main function was to report to him weekly, from an issued list, how many other high colonels were ahead of him to be promoted to generals”—took Rechy to Europe, where he acquired a touch more sophistication. A return to civilian life took him home, where, in the government housing where his mother lived, he wrote City of Night, a hallmark of beat-era and gay literature.
Keenly observed and well-written—readers will hope that a sequel is forthcoming.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1861-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
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
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