A mix of illuminating, though often dry, organizational lore and vibrant personal reflections on the war against AIDS.
A labyrinthine study that recounts the struggle to mobilize Asian American communities against the AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles.
Wat, the author of The Making of a Gay Asian Community (2002), bases his history on interviews with 36 mainly Asian American activists, mostly connected with the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team—a group that did feisty, innovative work in AIDS education and organizing in LA in the 1980s and ’90s. Their activities included distributing safer-sex kits, staging explicit sex education sessions with simulated sex acts, and launching an ad campaign to promote HIV testing with images of gay and lesbian Asian people embracing above the slogan “Love Your Asian Body.” Wat takes a deep dive into APAIT’s history and its challenges, such as trying to connect in culturally appropriate ways with Asian immigrants who didn’t speak English; confronting homophobia in conservative immigrant communities that prevented gay Asians from discussing their needs or seeking medical treatment; and debunking a widespread impression that Asians didn’t get AIDS and were possibly immune to it—or that gay Asians didn’t exist. In this loose-limbed narrative, Wat’s interviewees, starting with Gil Mangaoang, one of APAIT’s managers on staff in the ’90s, discuss their journeys toward activism, the difficulties of gaining acceptance from older and stodgier gay organizations, the surprisingly cutthroat office politics of the nonprofit sector, and intersectional issues. At one APAIT fundraiser, for instance, the ill-advised entertainment was a drag skit that spoofed domestic violence between pop stars Ike and Tina Turner for laughs, which elicited furious denunciations of gay male sexism from lesbian attendees.
Much of the book is a saga of institutional development that delves into budgeting, hiring personnel, management structures, employee relations, and complying with the paperwork demanded by government funding agencies. Poignantly, it climaxes in APAIT’s transformation into a well-funded, impeccably credentialed professional agency that jettisons the scrappy, anti-establishment activist ethos that put it on the map. It’s an unusually detailed look at the nuts and bolts of the nonprofit sector, and readers interested in the business and culture of the social work industry will find it valuable. However, Wat’s recap bogs down in thickets of minutiae and organizational acronyms, written in prose that sometimes feels as perfunctory as a newsletter: “APAIT, LAAPIS, and GAPSN would often cosponsor social events like dances and screenings of films with LGBTQ and Asian” content for “the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (organized by Visual Communications around late April and early May).” More compelling are the interviewees’ intimate observations as they relate coming-out dramas, grieving remembrances of loved ones, defiant paeans to sexual fulfillment, and brash, in-your-face riffs on their determination to explode bourgeois propriety: “We were the ones that were boldly talking about sex in the Asian American community when no one wanted to talk about it,” says Lisa Hasegawa, a former administrative assistant at the Asian Pacific Heath Care Venture organization. In these voices, readers will hear the exuberant energy that powered the movement.
A mix of illuminating, though often dry, organizational lore and vibrant personal reflections on the war against AIDS.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-295-74932-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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