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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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