An illuminating, well-written history of a unique place.
A vibrant social history of the iconic bastion of queer culture and leisure.
Inspired by the work of poet Frank O’Hara, a frequent visitor to Fire Island who was tragically killed in a freakish accident there in 1966, Parlett first ventured to the island in 2017 while furthering his doctoral research on American poetry and cruising. His experiences during this visit, as a curious researcher who was also actively engaged in the gay party scene, serve as the launching point for this uniquely insightful and colorful cultural history. Parlett traces the extraordinary literary heritage of the island, including its earliest foundation, laid by Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde; midcentury luminaries (W.H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Patricia Highsmith) and their booze-fueled escapades; and later, the more serious, politically charged influence of James Baldwin, who drew much-needed attention to the narrow Whiteness of the community. The hedonistic, sex-and-drug–laden tenor of the 1970s and ’80s, portrayed in novels by Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and others, was ravaged by the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, which had an indelible, long-lasting impact on the island’s literary and artistic culture. “Along with the many artists and writers lost to AIDS,” writes Parlett, “came the loss of an engaged and informed audience; the readership that kept gay publishing afloat, and the wider sense of a community consuming and critiquing the work of its own luminaries and emerging voices.” Throughout the book, the author smoothly interweaves an enlightened perspective of the island’s influence and importance with candid appraisals of its shortcomings, especially related to cultural homogenization and the overwhelming Whiteness that has continued into the 21st century. “Fire Island feels like a case study of utopian imperfections,” writes Parlett, “of the way norms become entrenched and inequalities perpetuated in a place defined by the fact that it is not, simply, for everyone.”
An illuminating, well-written history of a unique place.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-335-47518-3
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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