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    Unavailable
    The Best Little Boy in the World: The 25th Anniversary Edition of the Classic Memoir
    Unavailable
    The Best Little Boy in the World: The 25th Anniversary Edition of the Classic Memoir
    Unavailable
    The Best Little Boy in the World: The 25th Anniversary Edition of the Classic Memoir
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Best Little Boy in the World: The 25th Anniversary Edition of the Classic Memoir

    Written by Andrew Tobias

    Narrated by Matt Armstrong

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    “The best little boy in the world…always topped his class, honored mom and dad, deferred to elders and excelled in sports…The best little boy in the world was…the model IBM exec…The best little boy in the world was a closet case who 'never read anything about homosexuality…John Reid comes out slowly, hilariously, brilliantly. One reads this utterly honest account with the shock of recognition” - The New York Times

    In his classic memoir, Andrew Tobias relates his experience as the Best Little Boy in the World: a boy who doesn’t eat his Halloween candy without permission, won’t rip the tag off his mattress because the tag says not to, and didn’t fart for the first time until he was eighteen years old. Honest, funny, and insightful, Tobias (writing as John Reid) writes about his own journey coming out to--himself, to his friends, and to the world—and explores the fear, joy, excitement, mistakes, and inspirations he experienced along the way.

    In this new audio performance of the 25th Anniversary Modern Library Edition of The Best Little Boy in the World, Tobias’ deeply personal journey still resonates today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Book Audio
    Release dateFeb 28, 2017
    ISBN9781936455867
    Unavailable
    The Best Little Boy in the World: The 25th Anniversary Edition of the Classic Memoir
    Author

    Andrew Tobias

    ANDREW TOBIAS is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New York Times bestsellers Fire and Ice and The Invisible Bankers. He has been a regular contributor to such magazines as Time, New York, and Parade, and cohosted the PBS series Beyond Wall Street. 

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    Reviews for The Best Little Boy in the World

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    • 3/5
      Found this book at an AAUW booksale and bought it on the strength of its first few pages. And it was a deal, even if only for the first half. Tobias/Reid is an engaging writer with a terrific, self-deprecating sense of humor, which comes across wonderfully. TBLBITW is, I think, an excellent primer for non-gays like me about the heartaches and difficulties of growing up gay in the 1950s and 60s - and probably before that too. Tobias conveys a real and vivid sense of just how awful it was to pretend to be straight for the first 21 years of his life, and I felt for the guy. It is his sense of humor which ultimately saves the book, and makes it eminently readable for the most part. And it was, I'm sure, that same healthy sense of humor that saved Tobias himself as he was going through all those terrible and trying years of growing up, first groping for, then finding his true sexual identity and trying to figure out how in the hell he was supposed to live. It was only the second half of the book, after he "came out" following his college years, that the narrative became rather self-absorbed and even tedious, as he gave in to his compulsion to tell all about the various couplings and sexual practices of the gay community - in NYC, Boston, Provincetown, etc in that pre-AIDS era of the 70s. I know he'd been missing all this "fun" for ten-plus years, but sometimes "TMI" can be an apt objection. So I did some skim-reading for the last 50 or 60 pages. That said, this was a better, more readable book, in many ways, than Edmund White's gay autobiography, MY LIVES. But not quite as good as FAMOUS BUILDER, by Paul Lisicky, who knew where to draw that line. So I'll recommend the first half of the book, and the second half with reservations.
    • 5/5
      He's been there done that: important observations of a. parallel universe.
      Never have I heard my feelings and experiences described with such accuracy and angst. The author captures everyman in the narrative or at least the gay everyman who grew up in a closet. Spot on as he recounts the "etiquette" of bathhouses and gay bars; and captures the disengunity of high school and college "counselors". Best story I've read of everyday existence of gay boys to young men.