A gripping memoir about a gay man with feet in India and the U.S. as well as a book about how to put together a life.
A public health visionary gets personal with a powerful exploration of “the beguiling possibilities of gender beyond the conventional bipolarity of male and female, and the mysterious, limitless permutations of sexual desire.”
World Policy Institute senior fellow Dube (Sex, Lies, and AIDS, 2001, etc.) was born in Calcutta and is known for his work on poverty and AIDS. In this memoir, published in India in 2015, he recounts his journey to come out as a young gay man in India and America and his efforts to find a loving relationship in midlife. Much of the book, which begins when the author was 10 in 1971, reads like a novel, and he delivers many moving descriptions of various gay coming-of-age moments—e.g., the first time he was tested for HIV and his encounter with a Keith Haring mural, which “hit me with the force that Picasso’s Guernica had.” Equally affecting is Dube’s inquiry into the ways in which his personal and professional lives have intersected. For example, he undertook research into the unfolding HIV crisis in India at a time when female sex workers were in the bull’s-eye of HIV discourse in India. They had, Dube writes, “spared us blame and persecution for carrying the ‘gay plague,’ ” and the author had a kinship with them—like him, they knew what it was like to feel like an outcast. Yet in his policy writing, he “deliberately chose to keep silent about what I knew for a fact, that a significant proportion of Indian men were having unprotected sex with other men, thus putting themselves at risk of contracting HIV.” Dube also offers insights into the trials of love and of middle age. His account of the end of a long-term relationship—with its pitch-perfect description of two people who still love each other who can’t admit they are breaking up—will resonate with many readers.
A gripping memoir about a gay man with feet in India and the U.S. as well as a book about how to put together a life.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5847-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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
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.
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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