A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement’s true...
The life and times of an intrepid gay rights activist.
Segal’s swiftly written debut memoir looks back at his coming-of-age years in New York City through his achievements both personal and political, which have made him the “dean of American gay journalism.” Growing up isolated in the 1950s with “the only Jewish family in a South Philadelphia housing project,” the author, son of a decorated war hero, set his sights on New York (“the center of everything”) while passing his childhood years with eyes glued to the men’s underwear section of the Sears catalog and bonding with his civil rights advocate grandmother, who “celebrated diversity before it was fashionable.” Segal’s first interest in newspapers manifested as a young door-to-door salesboy, and then he branched out in later years as a founding journalist of the Philadelphia Gay News. He went on to chair political movements and lobby for LGBT anti-discrimination legislation with learned diplomacy and the launch of a series of nonviolent, press-frenzying “zaps,” which included crashing the sets of the Tonight Show and the CBS Evening News. Amid schisms within the gay community and the beginning of the nightmarish “deadly war” on AIDS, Segal fearlessly pressed onward, befriending pivotal politicos like Barney Frank and spearheading the development of LGBT senior housing projects. In other sections, the author vividly describes his firsthand experience as a teenager inside the Stonewall bar during the historic riots, his participation with the Gay Liberation Front, and amusing encounters with Elton John and Patti LaBelle. In a fitting coda to a vigorous life story, Segal, now 64, writes of finally wedding his longtime partner and of finagling a coveted photograph together with Michelle Obama.
A jovial yet passionately delivered self-portrait inspiring awareness about LGBT history from one of the movement’s true pioneers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61775-410-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Open Lens/Akashic
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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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