|
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s |  | Author: Edmund White
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $16.57
as of 11/22/2009 10:11 MST details
You Save: $9.43 (36%)
New (29) Used (10) Collectible (1) from $16.15
Seller: bookrackrh
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 5653
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1
ISBN: 1596914025
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781596914025
ASIN: 1596914025
Publication Date: September 29, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s, from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 good and dishy November 14, 2009
adorian
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a very good and gossipy book, full of "and then I met" celebrity sketches. The section on people he met in Venice could pass as one of the unwritten chapters from Capote's Answered Prayers. White loves to tell you who's gay and what he did about it.
Many of us grew up closeted in the sticks and we could only dream about going to Manhattan for the culture and partying, but White did it. Of course, for every successful White there were hundreds who failed. This is a tale of Believe in Yourself and you can triumph. It helps if you're witty and good-looking and able to establish great connections.
I enjoyed reading about gay life in Manhattan in the 60s and 70s. But then came the 80s and AIDS ruined everything. The book has great warts-and-all sketches of famous people (Virgil Thompson, Susan Sontag, Mapplethorpe, to name only a few), but there are also a lot of his author friends I had never heard of, and I was easily able to find their works here on amazon.com and to order a few.
This book doesn't make it all seem fun and glamorous. There were bad times, sad times, and that's what makes this book so important in documenting an important era in our culture scene. There are lots of witty observations and sharp cutting truths here. And there are laments for the lost time.
White Fills in the Blanks November 6, 2009
Larry Lingle (Houston, Texas USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Edmund White has always been one of my favorite writers - and considering I read mostly gay writers I suppose that means he is one of my favorite gay writers. And for that reason I especially enjoyed his reluctant but sincere defense of gay writing against all those closeted types that challenged his so defining himself. Having only met White once, a brief encounter outside a movie theater when I was in the company of Kim Brinster -then the manager of Oscar Wilde Bookshop which I then owned - and White with whomever was then his boyfriend, my only real life impression was that age in both our cases created some resemblance between us. Now there is a tortured sentence, but then, I'm not the writer. Having read White's much longer biographical novels I welcomed the filling in some of the blanks, and for the brevity. My overall impression is that White discounts his achievements somewhat from surprise of having accomplished same. Nonetheless, he is a delightful writer, a wonderful story teller and provides new dimensions to the lives of some of his contemporaries. I hope he will do something similar for the '80s and '90s and in an interview in The Gay & Lesbian Review he appears to indicate that this may be the case. If so, hopefully this publisher will stick with him and it will be forthcoming soon as I only have four years on White and I don't want to miss it.
 A Dark and Fascinating Account of Literary Ambition October 28, 2009
Kenneth R. Mabry (Atlanta, GA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
If Edmund White had been a completely different person, he might have enlisted in the military in the 1960's and built a career as a soldier, even as he suspected the true cost of war. Over forty years later, he could have written a memoir about his career, emanating from almost a type of post traumatic stress.
"City Boy" struck me as this type of dispatch, although White's battles were fought as he struggled to develop a literary career in New York during the 1960's and '70's.
After graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in Chinese, White was accepted into a Ph.D. program at Harvard. However, he chose to follow a boyfriend to New York, arriving in 1962. With no contacts in the literary world, White took a boring job at Time-Life Books which he later abandoned to take an extended trip to Rome. While he seemed to have little momentum, White writes, "I was obsessed with being famous--not rich, which held no interest for me, but famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite."
Reading about his life in the 1960's, I would not have bet on White achieving that goal. His first novel, "Forgetting Elena," was published in 1973, and his "breakthrough" novel, "A Boy's Own Story," was not published until 1982. White lived a bohemian existence, surviving on freelance work, developed friends and contacts in literary and cultural circles, and pursued his rapacious sexual appetites in the gay underground. This book contains fascinating accounts of time spent with luminaries such as James Merrill, Truman Capote, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, and others. What casts a pall over these stories, however, is how bizarre and unhappy so many of these icons seemed to be as they struggled to maintain careers in a city that runs white-hot with ambition. When you add White's poverty, his struggles to live as an openly gay man, and the death of legions of friends to AIDS, the account resembles a battlefield strewn with collateral damage.
The most hopeful note in this miasma is White's testament to friendship. He would wrap sexual trysts and lovers in disposable paper, while making presents of friends. You get the sense that the friendships were what enabled him to persevere in the midst of so much bleakness.
White has written numerous well-received works of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir and teaches writing at Princeton, so it could be said that he has realized many of his ambitions. The value in this memoir is in telling us the true price of this achievement.
City Boy October 21, 2009
Austin Cooper (Alabama, United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
J.E. Barnes reproaches White with the very faults he freely admits; to please Barnes, apparently, an autobiographer would have to indulge in self-glorification from the first page to the last. White is very funny about his youthful shortcomings and any reader who'd ever examined himself or herself would laugh along with the self-satire. "City Boy" is a witty, fascinating look at an era and a city and a culture as most of the reviews in the press and on Amazon attest. Only an envious, homophobic sourpuss like Barnes could take some of the positions he subscribes to-but if you look at his other reviews, you see that Barnes also raps Hemingway and Mark Twain on the knuckles and reserves his highest praise for "Peyton Place." He is also an admirer of old movie stars, pop singers, horror tales and UFOs-in fact, he's had a few "sightings" of his own! Too bad that Barnes's eccentricities lead him to attack so viciously a luminous, entertaining book such as "City Boy."
The City and Man That Never Sleeps October 20, 2009
Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
White's new memoir is extremely engaging, funny and entertaining. It contains a wealth of gem-like anecdotes. White encountered many of NYC's most important cultural and literary figures of the 60s and 70s period that he writes about. From Lillian Hellman to Harold Brodkey to Susan Sontag we are given his personal insights to what these vivacious personalities were actually like. I'll never be able to think of Peggy Guggenheim in the same way again after reading White's portrait of her. But in addition to writing about his many successes and exciting encounters during this time, the author also details the professional hardship of being a new writer in a city swarming with aspiring artists and the many failures he had to endure before finding success.
White also gives an interesting analysis of the evolving attitudes about homosexuality. He considers how gay people saw themselves in the 60s and 70s in relation to now. He also creates an incredibly dynamic account of NYC itself. He shows how it changed from a dilapidated hobbling metropolis to the booming cash rich centre and tourist destination that it'd become in the 80s. City Boy is an important chronicle of a certain period of time, but it is also a wickedly enjoyable read. Once you pick it up, you won't want to put it down until finishing the last page.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Working Dogs | |
