A superfluous survey of gay men's approaches to sexual behavior over the past 50 years. Sadownick (Sacred Lips of the Bronx, 1994) has combed the archives of modern gay history in search of specific accounts of sexual liaisons and examples of the shifting mindsets of successive generations of gay men. Beginning with ex-GIs' memoirs of WW II barracks assignations, he relates anecdotes of furtive, fearful cruising in YMCAs, parks, and public toilets during the postwar years, when perpetual threats of police entrapment and arrest kept nearly all gay men closeted. Having established quickly that gay sex in the '50s and '60s was a generally shadowy business, Sadownick fills in the pre-Stonewall period with alternately pointless and overfamiliar anecdotes about the early gay-rights activists, Allen Ginsberg's poetry, and contemporary psychological theories of sexuality. With the arrival of the modern era of gay liberation in 1969, the narrative picks up libidinous steam, quoting amply from journals, memoirs, and fictional accounts of anonymous sex in bathhouses and sex clubs. While these quotes demonstrate conclusively that gay men in the '70s were exceedingly promiscuous and staggeringly audacious in their pursuit of new sexual thrills, the point has hardly been in question. The era's excesses led to burnout among many men even before AIDS curtailed promiscuity, and for most of the '80s grief, confusion, and condoms quelled the exuberance of the sexual revolution. But the past several years have witnessed an unsettling tendency to defy AIDS through unsafe sex and drug use. When explaining such trends, Sadownick lets loose annoyingly facile bolts of analysis that cry out for clarification: ``Oppressed or not, many homosexual men lusted after men who symbolized the `masculine archetype' as it filtered through their feelings for their fathers.'' And since Sadownick generally considers only the most clichÇd gay lives in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this sexual history is far from definitive. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-251268-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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