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FIRST PERSON QUEER

WHO WE ARE (SO FAR)

Whether read in a couple of sittings or savored essay by essay, this is an eye-opening vista on diversity.

Personal nonfiction accounts from every stripe in the rainbow and then some.

In their second anthology, Labonté and Schimel (The Future is Queer, 2006) have assembled a plethora of Canadian and American authors who share the “satisfaction of a realized sexual self,” a penchant for the pronoun “I” (though not all contributors prefer it in its upper case state) and little else. The collection winningly celebrates differences rooted in a variety of ways to the mutable boundaries of sexuality and gender. Nalo Hopkinson, who identifies herself as a “queer, poly woman,” begins by discussing her difficulties in filling out a questionnaire on women’s sexual fantasies; she found no boxes into which she “could have wedged my experience.” Gregory Woods worries that his “queer membership” has lapsed because a transurethral prostate resection at age 50 has rendered him impotent. “I am a suburban, middle-aged, neo-virgin, luxuriating in regret,” he movingly laments. “How queer is that?” Transgendered author and performance artist Kate Bornstein offers a touching, funny piece detailing the delicacy involved in describing to the “blue-haired” ladies at her mother’s funeral her relation to the deceased. Her identity was less of an issue for Mom, Bornstein writes: “I told her that one of her two sons was about to become a dyke. She preferred the word lesbian. ‘My son, the lesbian,’ she would tell her close friends, with a deep sigh and a smile on her lips.” Some selections are more successful than others, but individual snapshots matter less than the extraordinary queer panorama they collectively embody.

Whether read in a couple of sittings or savored essay by essay, this is an eye-opening vista on diversity.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-55152-227-2

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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