From Publishers Weekly
In this collection of essays, gay activist Monette, winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Becoming a Man, addresses politics, religion, and AIDS. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
National Book Award winner Monette provides his third autobiographical installment of life with AIDS and in the gay rights movement. Following his poignant Borrowed Time (LJ 8/88) and the much-heralded Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (LJ 5/1/92), this book opens the remaining chapters of Monette's life album for all to read. In a collection of ten essays, Monnette writes passionately of life with lovers Roger and Steve, his grief over their early deaths from AIDS, the moral imperative of libraries to actively combat forces of censorship, and the anguish and anger caused by the AIDS holocaust. Reflecting upon his life, Monette poignantly confesses "I know why I've been pulling out the scrapbooks these last weeks, because the journey has suddenly stalled. The road doesn't go any further, the bridges are all washed out, or maybe I've just gone overboard in a squall." Certainly another award winner for Monette, this is a meritorious selection for all libraries.--Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Lib., Ind.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Monette follows his National Book Award-winning Becoming a Man (1992) just as he'd said he would, with a book of essays. They fill in some of the autobiographical gaps left by the prizewinner and its predecessor, Borrowed Time (1990); bring Monette's battle with AIDS down to the beginning of this year; and find him even angrier about what he feels is a general neglect of AIDS and its sufferers. The emotions his own and his peers' AIDS experiences have roused in him have made him one of the most powerful and compelling contemporary writers, able to quite sweep us up in his passions--here nowhere more than in scintillating travel reminiscences made the more brilliant for his most literate readers because so many of his goals were places famous for their historical or literary associations--Tintern Abbey, Tiberius' home on Capri, the graves of Keats and D. H. Lawrence. But those strong feelings, though they still carry us along, meet resistance when he waxes polemical, as in his recurrent attacks on the pope and institutional religion and his implication that AIDS and its sufferers are as much the victims of political power as Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. Yet even when he's most unreasonable, most unwarrantedly self-righteous on behalf of his "tribe"--gay men with AIDS--he's one thrilling personal essayist. He touches us, as the saying goes, where we live. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
Although novelist, memoirist, and poet Monette (Becoming a Man, 1992, etc.) is sometimes vituperative, his language is always sharp in these essays. It is only when he falls away from criticism that his prose thickens and slows down. In ``Puck,'' Monette writes in a seemingly benign way about his dog, but it soon becomes apparent that he is communicating something about himself through his unusually unsentimental relationship with the animal. ``Gert'' describes an elderly lesbian whom Monette befriends, and his admiration for and puzzlement over the elegant manner in which she both reveals and conceals her sexuality. Monette scathingly attacks the Pope in several of these essays, but ``My Priests'' describes the few men of the cloth he actually admires. They include a Catholic priest named Gambone, who left the order after his lover died of AIDS, and Brother Toby, who has organized a lay Catholic community for children with AIDS that sells Christmas trees to raise money. Monette describes his impromptu wedding ceremony, which was officiated by a New Age woman called Ma; Monette skeptically calls her ``the Auntie Mame of gurus,'' but he also respects the ``bluesy sort of comfort'' she brings to her many HIV-positive followers. In ``3275,'' Monette manages to avoid emotionalism even while describing different graves he has known (those of lovers and those of the famous). He constantly--and effectively--undercuts the material's saccharine potential with passages like ``Are you reeling from the mawkishness? Because it gets worse.'' Occasionally this incisiveness is lost. ``A One-Way Fare,'' an examination of the importance of different journeys he has made, drifts off into travelogue about halfway through, and the dissection of insomnia in ``Sleeping Under a Tree'' is less than involving. A mix of the personal and the political with the occasional misstep. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

This collection of essays constitutes the third volume of National Book Award winner Paul Monette's autobiographical writings. Among the pieces featured are Monette's portrait of his dog as they endure loss together, an atheist's appreciation of the saintliness of a priest, and a rumination on what it's like to be gay and lesbian today.

FROM THE PUBLISHER