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Summary: WOW!!!
Review: I am not one to pick up a book and read it! After recieving Holding The Man as a gift from a friend, I decided to give it a go...Well I'm glad I did, it was one of the best books I have ever read. Tim takes us on a journey of his life from his child hood, through the years he faces the challenges of being Gay...Being gay myself I can relate to some of the problems that arise..I recommend you have yourself a box of tissues. Thumbs up Tim!!!!!
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Summary: One of the Books That Will Have Changed My Life
Review: I bought this book on the recommendation of a manager at Gay's the Word in London. Otherwise, I never would have heard of it.I had to fight back tears and sobs, both on the tube to Heathrow and on the plane back to New York. A lot of people think the AIDS crisis is over. Many don't know what we have gone through, collectively. This book is essential reading for anyone who thinks safe sex is not necessary anymore. Much like David B. Feinberg's Eighty-Sixed, this is one of the books that is going to change my life. Holding the Man brings every emotion to the surface. It is also fitting that after his lover's father squashes John's homosexuality at the funeral, Tim writes a book that holds the truth up to the light, as John would have preferred. Possibly one of the best 10 books I will ever read in my lifetime. It captures the dual coming out -- telling people your'e gay and HIV+ -- perfectly. One almost gets the impression that Tim could not have rested in peace if he had not written this testament; it's a wonderful last gift to us that he wrote it.
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Summary: Quite, quite fantastic. Beyond that even.
Review: I can't put into words how good this book is. Anything I begin to say will be sadly inept, as this is just the most moving, emotional, desperately involving book that I have ever read. Half way through I looked at the back cover to see what else Tim had written, and was devastated to find out that he had died only a few years ago. I there is one person in this life I would have liked to have met, it would have been him. Please, anyone who reads this, treat this book with the sensitivity and love it deserves.
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Summary: Excellent!!!
Review: I dicovered that book at Hares and Hyenas when I was in Melbourne in 1995. It is probably the best gay book I have read. I gave it to my boyfriend who couldn`t finish it...it was too sad for him. Friends have given us a second copy as a gift and my boyfriend and I recommend this book to all our friends in Germany. I would LOVE to get the publishing rights for Germany and translate it into German!!
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Summary: Not for the weak of heart
Review: I finished Holding the Man last evening. The final 10 pages took me an hour to read. My mind was racing and yes there were tears in my eyes. This is an amazing chronicle of love found and love lost, found and lost again. I was left wondering if I will ever find such a strong connection with another person in my lifetime. I believe that I actually developed a reader's crush on John. My firends who knew him tell me that he was as virtuous as portrayed. One note of caution for non Australian readers. This book relies heavily on the use of Aussie slang. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Please Read This Book
Review: I found Holding the Man in a little bookshop in Melbourne this March. I had read many "AIDS" memoirs-- including Paul Monette's Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir and the very fine Heaven's Coast" A Memoir by Mark Doty and thought there was nothing else to be said on the subject. I was wrong. I cannot say enough good things about this book. It is so well written. In addition to being a poignant account of a beautiful love affair and sad, sad, death in the time of AIDS, it is a quite wonderful account of what it is like to be a gay teen as well. When I finished the book-- and yes, it will make you cry-- I felt an overwhelming sadness that this young man will never write again and that both these young men's lives were snuffed out at such an early age. And I wanted to see John's beautiful eyelashes. [....]
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Summary: One of the best love stories told
Review: I have given this book to friends all over the world (both gay and straight) and all say the same thing - "one of the nicest love stories ever told". I read it in one night and went through numerous kleenex's. No book has moved me as much as this book.
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Summary: simply wonderful
Review: I have just finished reading "Holding The Man". I think it is one of the best gay stories, if not the best, that I read so far.
No post-modernist circumvolutions of style, no flashbacks, no literary exertions. Just a heartfelt account of a gay man's life told in a simple, poetic style. The autobiography of a man who is going to die of AIDS and who has seen his lover die in his arms.
The book starts with the difficulties of his coming of age, realising at 14 what was his sexual orientation. The "crushes" as a young boy, finally his great love for John. Tim and John, two young men who live in an Australia which is still quite homophobic. Their catholic families who do not accept their children's homosexuality.
Their temporary separation and the betrayals told without hypocrisy.
Then the "plague" which takes hold of them both. They are both HIV positive.
From now on LOVE is the only word.
John and Tim become one and live together the terrible evolution of the disease, day after day.
I shed a river of tears while reading the last chapters of the book, they are incredibly beautiful and incredibly sad.
Thank you Mr. Conigrave, you gave us a great gift. Thank you, even if you cannot hear me any more.
I want to finish quoting the last sentence which is in Italian, my native tongue.
"Ci vedremo lassù, angelo".
This is what Tim says to his dead lover John.
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Summary: Honestly the best book i have read
Review: I just have to say im not much of a book reader, i first read this book in 1999 my exboyfriend had read it and recommended it to me i read this whole book within 4 days as we were headed to melbourne for the weekend, i could not let this book go, i have since recommended it to a number of readers and they have loved it, i am reading it again for the 5th time and still it makes me happy sad and even cry would have loved to have met Timothy Conigrave and shake his hand for this magnificant story. Im in europe now and the book has followed goes to show i love it.
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Summary: Still touches me
Review: I read this book a few years back when I was in a private school in Melbourne, not really Xavier so I couldn't trace back in the school's yearbooks but it still really hit home hard because it happened so close to me (and many other people that I know). It's an amazing book about bravery, acceptance and most of all love. It is one of the truest books about what love can really be about - gay or straight.
It is a wonderful, sad, uplifting and inspiring story that anyone - gay, straight, male, female - should read.
Highly recommended if you can get your hands on a copy - or if you can't, keep writing to the publisher/Amazon to get them to start reprints! In today's modern society of a growing homosexual acceptance and tolerance, it is comforting to read something as touching as this while teaching us many new ways to think.
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