The fiery edge that burns through the first two-thirds of the book dissipates in the end.
A wistful and feverishly told tale of the founding and implosion of the notorious lesbian rights collective.
Cogswell chronicles the beginnings, glory days and bitter end of the short-lived activist group Lesbian Avengers. The author developed from a young woman in 1992, sitting on the perimeter of the group's first meetings at the Gay and Lesbian Center in Manhattan (and cringing at the word lesbian, "a label of no return"), to being the organizer of the direct actions that shaped the group's renegade identity. She explains it as "a direct action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility" and says that eating fire was more than an attention-getting circus trick; it was a daring and empowering act, a ritual “changing hate and fear into a kind of resolve.” Some stories in the early chapters are presented in a nonlinear manner, but they vividly describe Cogswell's budding political awareness against the backdrop of gentrification in the East Village, the election of law-and-order Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the passage of anti-gay legislation across the country; her excitement about moving to the forefront of the group as a fire-eating activist is palpable. But when the group implodes—done in by internal squabbling, backbiting, racial rifts and personal grudges—about two-thirds of the way through the book, the accounts of her long-term relationship and subsequent work as a citizen-journalist moving among France, Cuba and New York City are not nearly as vibrant. Although the Lesbian Avengers have been defunct since 1995, Cogswell's idealistic objective in the fight for civil rights is still relevant: to make lesbians visible, change society, and most importantly, change lesbians, who will come to see the public space as theirs.
The fiery edge that burns through the first two-thirds of the book dissipates in the end.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9116-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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