Worshipful, occasionally overenthusiastic, yet engaging and sometimes surprisingly insightful.
The grooving story of the disco sensation, freighted with a goodly amount of cultural analysis.
Gamson (Freaks Talk Back, not reviewed) is so in love with his subject that this biography of 1970s disco superstar Sylvester is in fact more celebration than study, though carefully researched nonetheless and able to unearth the occasional sociological gem. Born in 1947, Sylvester James grew up in a large, churchy black family in South Central Los Angeles, where he loved singing in the gospel choir as much as tottering around in his mother’s heels. In adolescence, when his screaming femininity stopped seeming cute, Sylvester left home and started hanging with the Disquotays, a fierce band of drag queens who could hold their own in fights with the local toughs—he would never again have any desire to dress the way society said a man should. By 1970, Sylvester had migrated to San Francisco and fallen in with the absurdist drag/clown performing troupe the Cockettes. With his gospel-tinged style and oddly effective falsetto, he quickly became one of the group’s star attractions and was the sole high point of their otherwise disastrous 1971 New York shows. Afterward, Sylvester went on his own. His solo career steadily gathered steam, culminated with his smash 1978 disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” then swiftly downshifted with the late ’70s anti-disco backlash. Unlike most stories of supposed one-hit wonders, however, Gamson’s narrative is thoroughly grounded in Sylvester’s work in the San Francisco gay club scene, where he remained a huge sensation well into the 1980s, before dying of AIDS in 1988. Sylvester’s flamboyant diva style is excitingly rendered here, as friends and associates seemingly fall over each other to describe one more fabulous outfit or dramatic entrance, the best being that time Sylvester roller-skated through the streets of South Central in full drag and pigtails.
Worshipful, occasionally overenthusiastic, yet engaging and sometimes surprisingly insightful.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7250-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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