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 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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