2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Web Is Full of Watch Reviews. But He Wrote the First Ones.
At exactly 10:22 p.m. on Nov. 30, 1992, undertakers carried the body of Walt Odets's partner out of their home in Berkeley, Calif. The love of Mr. Odets's life had succumbed to complications from the virus that causes AIDS.
A week later, Mr. Odets's therapist asked how he knew the exact time. 'Because I looked at my watch,' he replied.
The exchange appeared in Mr. Odets's 2019 book, 'Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives' — a summation of his career as a clinical psychologist and H.I.V./AIDS activist that a New York Times reviewer called 'poignant and achingly beautiful.'
In the book, Mr. Odets wrote that he had looked at his watch because he 'wanted to see something that was reliable, something that — unlike the human lives you loved and needed — could be trusted.'
His lifelong fascination with wristwatches soon grew much deeper, and he did something almost no author — not even his father, the celebrated playwright Clifford Odets — can claim: He created a genre, the formal wristwatch review.
'Walt's World'
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