An indelible collection of wise voices resonating with experience, pride, resilience, and revolution.
LGBTQ community elders reflect on the decades since the Stonewall uprising.
After conducting an expansive statistical research project on the sexual satisfaction of LGBTQ elders, veteran sex educator Fleishman acknowledges this demographic’s “invisibility,” and she channels her findings into a book of profiles of LGBTQ seniors whose memories and experiences form a moving tapestry of American gay history. Perhaps the most outspoken interviewee is transgender rights advocate Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, one of the few remaining survivors of the uprising and a major influence who has served as a “mother and grandmother figure to countless trans and nonbinary people around the world.” Among the couples interviewed are Bob Isadore and his partner, David Velasco Bermudez, who was inside the establishment that night in 1969 to mourn Judy Garland’s death; and late-stage activist lesbians Edie Daly and Jackie Mirkin, who met in their 60s and married in 2008. Many other contributors—diversified by age, race, and locale—share their opinions on ageism, sex, and their methods of staying true to the integrity of a liberation movement they helped foster. Mandy Carter, a veteran justice organizer, shares her coming-of-age experience as a black lesbian; at 70, she appreciates “the importance of being humble, dreaming big, and taking risks.” Activist Hardy Haberman reflects on a 1964 Life Magazine article about homosexuality that sparked an interest in kink and leather subcultures and the misconceptions about sexual violence involved in those cultures. As Fleishman convincingly demonstrates, these significant voices embody the legacy of a movement for equality, anti-discrimination, and sexual freedom; they also encourage younger community members to take an active role in the preservation of those hard-earned liberties. Though this inspirational volume represents just a small sampling of the community’s movers and shakers, it deserves prominent placement on LGBTQ history bookshelves. Kate Bornstein and Barbara Carrellas provide the foreword.
An indelible collection of wise voices resonating with experience, pride, resilience, and revolution.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-55896-853-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Skinner House
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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