BOOK CLUB: January Selection - JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith
Tuesday, January 25
7:30pm @ Magnet

Your New Year's resolution is to be more well-read in 2011? We got you covered. Our monthly BOOK CLUB meets at the Magnet Health Clinic (4122 18th Street) the last Tuesday of the month to discuss the latest, most buzzworthy titles popular in the LGBT community.

Our New Year's resolution here at A Different Light has always been to learn more from the men and women who came before us and paved the way to a more enlightened sensibility. With that thought in mind, we are happy to announce our first BOOK CLUB selection of the New Year: the National Book Award-winning JUST KIDS by Patti Smith.

Grab your copy at A Different Light, mention the Magnet Book Club and get 10% off! Then come discuss the book at Magnet Health Clinic (4122 18th Street) on January 25.

"Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren't always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late '60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices--or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend's delight, from a poet into a rock star. Mapplethorpe soon became famous too--and notorious--before his death from AIDS in 1989.

Smith's memoir of their friendship is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems, balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way." --Tom Nissley

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith
Tuesday, January 25
7:30pm @ Magnet