bookshelf

ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST

Name: ONE OF THESE THINGS FIRST
Author: Steven Gaines
ISBN: 978-1-883285-69-2

by Steven Gaines ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

A spirited narrative of a hard-won coming-of-age.

bookshelf

The story of the author’s experiences of transformation in a famed mental hospital.

In the early 1960s, after a failed suicide attempt, Gaines (Fool’s Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach, 2009, etc.), at 15, became a patient at the Payne Whitney in Manhattan, where Marilyn Monroe, Carson McCullers, William S. Burroughs, Robert Lowell, and other notables had been treated. In a candid, entertaining memoir, the author chronicles growing up gay and confused in Borough Park, “the cognac of Brooklyn, the potent and flavorful essence”; dealing with his father’s rage, teenage crushes, and strange compulsions; and landing at the storied hospital where fellow patients included producer Richard Halliday, husband of actress Mary Martin; a raunchy, eccentric contessa; and a woman who claimed to be John F. Kennedy’s spurned mistress. Gaines was put under the care of a psychiatrist to whom he finally confided the cause of his distress: “I THINK I AM A HOMOSEXUAL,” he wrote in a sealed note. “Homosexuality can be cured, like many other disorders,” his doctor told him, news that buoyed Gaines’ spirits. “I would jump through hoops of fire,” he thought, “if I could be normal.” Although the path to heterosexuality eluded him at Payne Whitney and through 12 years of Freudian therapy, Gaines changed radically. Under the mentorship of the moody Halliday, who imparted Broadway gossip; the spurned mistress, who prescribed for him new clothes from Brooks Brothers and a spiffy hairstyle; and Martin’s suggested reading list (including To Kill a Mockingbird and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Gaines left behind his provincial Brooklyn roots. “I felt like Eliza Doolittle at the psycho country club,” he writes. “Maybe it was a ship of crazies, but I had embarked on a voyage where almost anything was possible.” In this short memoir, the author vividly portrays the crazies both within and outside of the mental hospital.

A spirited narrative of a hard-won coming-of-age.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-883285-69-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Delphinium

Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GRETA GARBO HOME FOR WAYWARD BOYS AND GIRLS
by Steven Gaines

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
by Peter Brown & Steven Gaines

- BOOK REVIEW
FOOL’S PARADISE
by Steven Gaines

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

bookshelf

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.