An offbeat but engaging exploration of the religious right from a self-described radical lesbian. Minkowitz already has a gem of a reputation among the religious right for her famous 1995 Ms. article, where she posed as a teenage boy to get the scoop on the Promise Keepers. In this book (her first), the Village Voice reporter infiltrates other bastions of evangelicalism, including Focus on the Family, the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, and Grace ‘N Vessels, —a kaffeeklatsch of Christian women.— But Minkowitz’s insinuations shun the facile genre of exposÇ for a more subtle and more personally revealing give-and-take. At Promise Keepers, she is moved by the tender affection that men are permitted, for once, to demonstrate to other men and by the participants— anguished admissions of their relational failures. At its core, though, this is a book about sex, about the unbridled passion that simultaneously fascinates and repels the religious right. At the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (a group whose worship is so spontaneous and radical that it has been removed from its parent denomination), Minkowitz observes how the language of worshipers casts God as an angry, abusive lover, a theme that is repeated often throughout the book. In many evangelical circles, the worshiper’s relationship with God is portrayed as almost explicitly sexual: —can—t nobody do me like Jesus,— as one little girl says proudly. Minkowitz interweaves several chapters on organizations in the gay rights movement, including Sex Panic! and the S/M Leather Fetish Celebration. What she discovers through these implicit comparisons is that the radical right is a lot more like the radical left than it is different from it—especially regarding sex. She claims that both groups obsess about conquering sin (which S/M people call —violence—). Told with great humor and also—yes, really—love. As Minkowitz brazenly tells three white men from Focus, —I really love you guys. But I just really hate your sin!—
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83322-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
