Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday December 10, 2010
|
SUGAR CHANGED THE WORLD: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science
SUGAR CHANGED THE WORLD: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos
Clarion
ISBN 978-0618574926
$20. Ages 12 and up
ZORA AND ME Victoria Bond and TRISBN 978-0763643003
$16.99. Ages 10 and up
MIRROR Jeannie Baker
Candlewick
ISBN 978-0763648480
$18.99. Ages 5-8
Reviewed by many of the same activities and dreams, they take a first important step to becoming citizens of the world. Jeannie Baker holds a mirror up to two families, one in Morocco and one in Australia, and invites children to see their similarities. The innovative format makes use of carefully designed layouts, meticulous details and brilliantly colored collages to follow two young boys and their families from sunup to moon-rise. Their facing stories are bound at the outer edges of the cover so that the pages open to form side-by-side panoramas. On the left-hand side, a yellow van threads through heavy traffic on its way to a hardware store where a father and son pick out supplies to renovate their home; on the right-hand side, a donkey carries a father and son through a vast desert-scape on their way to a village market where they will sell their goods. Both are straightforward narratives, but examined side-by-side, they show how our lives intersect and how those connections enrich us all.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
SECRET HISTORIAN: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
Justin Spring
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0374281342
478 pages
$32.50
Reviewed by Andrew Holleran
Samuel Steward, as even Justin Spring admits, is an "odd candidate" for a biography. Author of a series of novels narrated by the gay hustler Phil Andros, Steward was friends with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, slept with Rock Hudson, Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder, and worked with Alfred Kinsey on his study of American sex lives. But he was also a rather sad wannabe: a man who wanted to move to Paris but never did, a writer whose dream of a great novel devolved into porn, a college professor who ended up a tattoo artist in the Oakland slums -- which, of course, is why this book, which was nominated for a 2010 National Book Award, is so engrossing: The reality was more interesting than his dreams.
Steward wanted to write about homosexuality at a time when gay subject matter was considered ipso facto pornography, and it's hard to say who treated him more brutally: the hustlers who beat him up or his publishers. The main thing is that Steward kept a record. He and Kinsey bonded not only because both were interested in sex, but because they were equally obsessive recorders of data. These include a massive sex journal that Steward kept at Kinsey's request and the so-called Stud File, in which everyone Steward had sex with from 1924 to 1974 was recorded on an annotated card (or, in the case of Valentino, in a reliquary containing his pubic hair).
The Sheik met Steward when he was passing through Columbus, Ohio, where the three unmarried aunts who raised Steward after his mother died had moved to further their ward's education. A brilliant student, he grew up to get a doctorate at Ohio State and a job teaching English literature at Catholic colleges in Chicago -- though his real career was sexual. Like his hero, the French novelist Jean Genet, Steward spent his life in search of what used to be called "rough trade" -- even going so far as to type up a list of the 20 precise things he wanted done, and not done, when he hired a sadist.
These calm instructions for controlled degradation ("Wear dirty socks. Cram them in his mouth.") exemplify what makes Spring's biography so compelling: the contrast between the detached college professor and the experiences into which his devotion to Priapus led him. Steward tried to live a conventional life. But while teaching at DePaul University, he needed amphetamines to get through class, hosted orgies in his apartment, and became a tattoo artist after realizing his guests were ignoring him because he was too old. Tattooing was a way to maintain access to his sexual ideal (the sailor) till the English Department learned he'd opened up a parlor on the bus route used by a nearby naval base, whereupon he was fired and moved his business to California, just when the '60s hit the fan -- black power, LSD, communes and Hell's Angels, who protected Steward in exchange for tattoos. Even his biographer calls Steward's life one of "constant disappointment, discouragement, isolation and rejection."
But was it? It's hard to say after reading "Secret Historian" whether Steward was a gay hero or a gay nightmare. That's the fascination of the book. "I have attempted to write a biography," Spring claims, "just as Steward might have: with a minimum of moralizing, and the lightest possible touch." But this scrupulous neutrality can leave the reader unmoored. The problem is that everything is given equal weight: Steward getting mugged so badly he needs a hip replacement, Steward writing a letter to Alice B. Toklas. Steward, Spring writes, "was never one for self-pity," but the "whimsical-serious" tone of Steward's own writing makes it hard to know what he really felt. His alcoholic, Bible-teaching father claimed that his son's homosexuality "cut my heart out," and Steward loved Kinsey precisely because Kinsey was not shocked or judgmental, leading Steward to wonder if his father's rejection had not scarred him more than he knew.
But since most of "Secret Historian" is based on the sex journal, what we get is more sex than motivation. "I don't think it's a hunger for love," Steward wrote, "because I don't know what love is: (My) heart has been dead for a long time." In fact, Steward believed gay men were loners -- who "should live alone and learn to like it, and to be self-sufficing" -- despite the community that saved his papers, made a pilgrimage to him in old age and produced this fascinating slice of American history.
"Secret Historian" is worth reading not for its subject's slight acquaintance with a few famous people, nor for his writing (which Spring admits is mostly out of print), but for the solitary splendor, the demented focus, the "closed-off narcissism" of his sexual quest -- at a time when even Gertrude Stein was in the closet.
Andrew Holleran's most recent book is "Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 MOONLIGHT MILE
GOLD BOY, EMERALD GIRL: Stories
AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY
TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM
WORTH DYING FOR |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
