Inauthentic and overblown.
Tongue-in-cheek memoir of a middle-aged gay man who, inspired by Thoreau, moved to rural Michigan to pursue his writing and the simple life.
Rouse (Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler, 2007, etc.) jettisoned urban pleasures and set out with his partner to craft a new life in the woods. The narrative is organized around ironic “life lessons” drawn from his reading of Thoreau and supplemented by research from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. Along the way, he was ravaged by a raccoon, shopped at a warehouse store, went ice fishing and built a snowman, “complete with a very impressive thick stick penis.” His meandering text offers various observations on the differences between city and country life. Urbanites have fashion, credit-card debt and neighbors who never intrude. Country dwellers are so benighted they can’t even deal with his tiny little list of 21 items his local grocery should carry—typical entry: “Silver Palate rough-cut oatmeal (must be the slow-cook kind, not the instant.” When the clerk responded with mild mockery, he considered “pushing the bowling pencil into her jugular… [I] am convinced that if I explained all of this to a jury of my peers, I would be acquitted. But I know I have no ‘peers.’ ” Rouse apparently aspires to reconfirm tired stereotypes about backward country people and flamboyant gay men. He also indulges in occasional flurries of tepid misogyny (a comment about dull female birds, an encounter with a lesbian sewer expert). The author’s attitude and tone, including his liberal use of uninspired profanity, is encapsulated in the opening description of himself as “a self-obsessed gay man who intentionally bedazzled himself in $1,000 worth of trendy clothing just to walk the trash out in the middle of fucking nowhere!”
Inauthentic and overblown.Pub Date: June 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-45190-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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