Extravagantly solipsistic.
Hothouse recollections of growing up gay.
Now 27 and a creative-writing teacher in the New York City public schools, the author was reared in Petunia, Texas. Abandoned by his father on the family ranch with just a Jaguar convertible for transportation, Mother took young Robert to Nieman Marcus in nearby Houston every Saturday to get their hair and nails styled. Mother, a unique personality as her son remembers her, was more luridly glitzy than Mame and more maliciously avaricious. (Her favorite movie: Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) Early on, young Robert displayed a heightened sensitivity superior to those of his drab neighbors in their dreary houses. He made clever comments regarding gents in tacky sans-a-belt pants. He was partial to Liza Minnelli, Dina Merrill and—though he was surely prettier—Lillian Hellman. Clearly, here was the next Capote. Despite those Neiman Marcus Saturdays, his gay leanings were apparently unknown to Robert until, at 17 and still in high school, he met dancer Michael, the love of his life. (The couple now lives in New York). The author’s slightly histrionic recollections contain over-the-top set pieces regarding his evangelical school, Mother’s hair treatment (she winds up with a cheap wig glued to her bald head) and her impromptu boob and lip augmentations. The text is lush with simile, verdant with metaphor and generally permeated with writerly flair. Though the author calls it a memoir, it reads more like a comic novel with considerable theatrical panache. Addressing his readers as “mes petites,” the beautiful boy frequently seems to speak to a special audience.
Extravagantly solipsistic.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36168-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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