A textbookish chronological overview of same-sex sexual practices, from early primates to Homo sapiens. ``Western societies have lately grown more homophobic. . . . It was with great relief that I discovered many societies of the past entirely free of such a taint,'' writes Spencer, a British journalist and novelist (The Tyranny of Love, 1968, etc.). He offers many examples of the latter—from peaceful bonobo chimpanzees (the apes most closely resembling our prehominid ancestors), who practice incest, same-sex sex, and group sex, to ancient Greeks, Romans, and Celts, whose socially sanctioned customs included pederasty and bisexuality. Drawing from legal, religious, historical, and literary evidence, he demonstrates positive acknowledgments of homosexuality in the Bible (in the story of David and Jonathan), as well as in ancient China (he points to homoerotic poetry and tales from the Zhou Dynasty), Renaissance Italy (as documented by artists like Benvenuto Cellini), and the US during WW II (until the subsequent McCarthyite witch hunts). Spencer doesn't break new ground; much of his material is covered in recent histories by Martin Duberman, Randy Shilts, and others. But he collects a prodigious amount of information in one place. And while he expresses strong opinions, he is refreshingly reluctant to push a political agenda, preferring to let the evidence make its own case. He maintains that the more people respect both the male and female sides of themselves, the happier and more tolerant everyone will be; but capitalism, he feels, discourages this and promotes homophobia. He takes up the view of essentialists, that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon that has always existed but that levels of social acceptability have varied greatly. However, throughout the book he passes quickly over too much material, overemphasizes British history, and admittedly limits his focus almost exclusively to the sexual practices of men, making this account at once too broad and too narrow. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100223-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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