Duberman (History/CUNY) follows up his widely admired Stonewall (1993) with a sequence of gripe-filled autobiographical essays about the decade after the Stonewall riots. In a preface, Duberman says he wanted to intermingle passages from his '70s diary with essays about the time, identifying and amplifying thematic connections between public and private life in order to ``lay bare the limits of reliable historical memory.'' The method fails. Duberman was a leader in gay-rights organizations and campaigned hard for gay visibility in academia for much of the decade, but the conflicts between radical leftists and conservative reformers in the gay movement have been detailed elsewhere, far more cogently and without the obsessive gnawing at old grievances that suffuses the first half of this book. The author quotes from his own articles, diaries, and letters, but he seems to be not so much assembling different perspectives as combing his past writings for showy one-liners. He attempts to persuade us that his playwriting career was thwarted by a homophobic conspiracy of producers and influential critics, but the discussion comes off as self-serving. Having portrayed a public atmosphere bereft of intellectual vigor and full of petty procedural squabbles, Duberman takes up his private life in several comparatively straightforward chapters about emotional crises. When he delves into the protoNew Age forms of psychotherapy he pursued, he occasionally captures his own odd moods and those of the decade with genuine resonance. But the real-world details that vivify a memoir elude Duberman: his relationships and ``sexual adventuring'' are described almost entirely as abstract concepts, and though he taught college and lived in New York for the entire period under discussion, the details of his nonpolitical, nonacademic interests—home, friends, ordinary routine—remain ciphers. Duberman talks about his habit of overrationalizing, which often made him miss out on full understanding of his emotional experiences. His book is crippled by the same flaw.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81836-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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