A blathering memoir describing how an odd handful of movies moved and influenced Horrigan (English/Long Island Univ.) in his youth. Born in 1963, the author was raised in a largish Irish-Catholic family in Reading, Penn., and spent his childhood listening avidly to Barbra Streisand records and mooning over his favorite movies, especially The Sound of Music; Hello, Dolly!; The Poseidon Adventure; The Wiz; and Dog Day Afternoon. Into oppressively detailed transcriptions of scenes from this bleak canon he inserts anecdotes from his life and various fantasies the films inspired, but there is not much insight to be found in his shaggily meandering chatter. Horrigan’s piano teacher commented on Christopher Plummer’s cardboard character in The Sound of Music, and the author muses, “Apparently Mrs. Hasbrouck didn—t think all men were alike or that they were all as bad as Captain von Trapp. Hmm!” Aerial shots and grand spaces fascinated him—the Poseidon’s ballroom, the restaurant into which Streisand descends during the title number of Hello, Dolly!, the von Trapps” villa, the Alps, several screen depictions of New York City—but it seems the chief reason for this attraction was that his own house was too crowded for him to masturbate comfortably. Grasping at straws, he reads The Poseidon Adventure as a metaphor for the homosexual’s struggle to come out. Horrigan imagined his life would become special only if he were a movie star, and the book climaxes with a lengthy treatment of a homoerotic film in which the adolescent author would co-star with Al Pacino (“So Al would bury his face in my neck, but rather than lift it again, he would linger there,” etc.), followed by a sophomoric imaginary interview with Dick Cavett. Horrigan seems not to have grown out of the juvenile self-absorption re-created here, however; he invites us to wallow with him in his obsessions, but he does nothing to make us care. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-299-16160-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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