The Same Language
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.15 (802 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0817314792 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 344 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-08-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Having read the book, I found myself very much wanting to meet him.”--David Leavitt, author of The Body of Jonah Boyd. In this lucid, thoughtful, and eminently readable memoir, Ben Duncan proves himself more than equal to the memoirist’s principal task: recreating the ambience of a lost age, while melding personal recollection with vivid portraits of other people
He revealed much--a harrowing childhood, his tenacity and drive for self-definition and self-creation. As a gay man living in Great Britain at a time when homosexuality was aggressively prosecuted in the courts, Duncan was forced to hide an essential feature of his life and identity.Now, in The Same Language, Duncan tells his story anew, weaving throughout his original memoir italic passages that reveal the true circumstances of his life--dire, humorous, and angry by turns--and honor the kinds of love, sexuality, and support that animated and defined his existence.Shifting from past to present and back again, Duncan tells of growing up in a string of foster homes, joining the military, earning a scholarship to Oxford, and negotiating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of English immigration officials determined to keep him out. But here also is Duncan’s account of his evolving sexuality, the many masks he was forced to contrive for survival and acceptance, and a vivid rendering of the underground world of gay life at every level of academia, politics, class, and social life in 50s and 60s-era Britain.An alien in his adopted country, an alien by nature of his sexual orientation, Duncan’s story is a touching chronicle of one man’s search for home--in a new country, with a man he loves, and within himself--a life no longer masked, but his own.. When Ben Duncan chronicled his evolution from a Depression-era orphan in Alabama to an Oxford educated writer a
Matthew Chapman said A beautiful book. This is not just a book about a man's life, nor is it just a book about a gay man's life. By its form - information about Ben's life that couldn't be printed in the sixties is now added in italics - it shows how attitudes towards homosexuality have changed. This is at once poignant, because you see a man's love for another man that, while identical to any other kind of love between adults, had to be hidden in ways one never thought of, and hopeful in that things are clearly better now than they were. Most important of all, it's an absorbing, often funny story and b. "Five Stars" according to RST. Excellent!