A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.
Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Powers initiates a desperate manhunt for his suicidal gay twin brother, who has vanished seven years after their tumultuous college days.
Alerted by his brother’s colleague, Powers discovers that his brother—they were born five minutes apart, both gay—has mysteriously disappeared. Knowing what he knows about Tim and his emotional issues, Kim suspects his brother has gone on a drinking binge due to anxiety over some changes in his life, including a new apartment. There’s much history between them. After their mother died young (of indeterminate causes), feelings of guilt and confusion surfaced, and both brothers resigned to believing they were the product of a “cursed childhood.” Growing up together, then separating after college, Kim moved in with his lover, a costume designer in Manhattan, and moody brother Tim relocated to Kentucky for a “crashed and burned” lifestyle of heavy drinking, self-mutilation and extravagant letter-writing to his brother before finally moving to New York and getting a job with a middling film director. Upon Tim’s disappearance, Kim notifies their older brother, anxiously questions friends, scours Tim’s apartment, his day-planner and bundles of secret letters, then smartly goes back to his brother’s college research papers, since this latest disappearance coincided with the same time of year as Tim’s emotional breakdown while away at college—the year he’d described as “swimming in time and space.” Picking up clues here and there, Kim follows a “path of bloody breadcrumbs” from a Greenwich Village bar, then sniffing around painful, long-buried memories back at Austin College in Texas, and on to some difficult soul-searching of his own. Powers amplifies his quest with frantic energy and such a desperate sense of urgency that when Tim is finally discovered, their tearful reunion seems anticlimactic at first—but more heartbreak is close behind.
A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-78671-723-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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