An important and touching account of a community’s struggles against LGBTQ+ discrimination.
A high school music teacher stands to lose his job after being outed as gay by a student in this work about LGBTQ+ rights.
Yared, an attorney, offers this true story about teacher Gerry Crane’s fight to keep his job at a public high school trying to force him out for being gay. The emotionally charged legal and personal fight began in 1995, the same year “Michigan Governor John Engler signed a law banning same-sex marriage and prohibiting the recognition of out-of-state same sex marriage.” Discrimination against LGBTQ+ citizens was legally endorsed, and a culture of homophobia was rife. A student of Crane’s, one he had disciplined, according to the author, obtained the program for the teacher’s ceremonial marriage to his partner, Randy, and shared it with the administration at Byron Center High School. The school, where Crane taught music and was recognized by students and the administration as an excellent teacher and role model, was “located in religiously and politically conservative West Michigan.” The administration used the town’s religious beliefs to fuel a homophobic battle to oust Crane, portraying him as morally unfit because he was gay. Yared rigorously shares the details of Crane’s struggle to defend his personal life and his courageous efforts to stand up to the school’s many attempts to force him to resign. Crane’s initial refusal to leave his teaching position was met with enmity from the town’s bigoted members but also with dedication and love from many of his students. Crane, a deeply religious man, became a champion for his LGBTQ+ students, closeted and fearful to come out in a hostile climate. Yared was formerly on the board of directors of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Network of West Michigan. In presenting Crane’s inspiring story, the author skillfully depicts the culture of a time when personal protests and supportive communities joined forces against discrimination, paving the way for activists to earn more rights for LGBTQ+ citizens everywhere. The author’s prose is on the anecdotal side, missing opportunities to use rich descriptions to tell this compelling tale. Nevertheless, the moving book serves as a significant contribution to the history of protests that individuals have waged to improve the lives of all LGBTQ+ people.
An important and touching account of a community’s struggles against LGBTQ+ discrimination.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73523-710-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Penning History Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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