The frank and sometimes-graphic timeline of one gay man’s life, his involvement in promoting gay rights, and the AIDS...
A key member of the San Francisco gay movement traces his life story.
Like many homosexuals born in the 1950s, Jones “grew up not knowing if there was anyone else on the planet who felt the way we felt.” Then he moved from Phoenix to San Francisco and discovered the blossoming world of like-minded individuals who relished their new sexual freedom and transformed neighborhoods into havens for the gay community. In this honest, occasionally explicit narrative, Jones discusses his own gayness and the partying, dancing, drugs, and sex with multiple partners that he and so many others engaged in during the 1970s and ’80s. He traveled through Europe, enjoying the scenery and beautiful men he found along the way, but he always wound up returning to San Francisco. Eager to help the “movement,” Jones worked in Harvey Milk’s office and was present the day he was murdered, an event that led the author to more political and social activism. When the AIDS epidemic struck, killing thousands, Jones co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and was the inspiration and push behind the AIDS Memorial Quilt project. Jones provides readers with a precise, uninhibited, inside look into the gay movement from its inception to its present-day status. He includes multiple references to world events as they happened through the past few decades, which help ground readers and link the actions in the gay world to those of society at large. Numerous lovers, political activists, and friends are included in this raw and expressive memoir, which features its most touching moments as Jones describes the anguish and sorrow he and so many others experienced as the AIDS crisis clobbered the gay community.
The frank and sometimes-graphic timeline of one gay man’s life, his involvement in promoting gay rights, and the AIDS epidemic.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-31-631543-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
