This handsomely produced large-format volume traces over 25 years of the gay and lesbian movement's history through the pages of its foremost newsmagazine, the Advocate. (Thompson is senior editor). This is an appropriate choice for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, generally considered the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement in the US. Going year by year, this volume offers a survey of major political, cultural, social, and medical events in the history of the gay and lesbian movement, as reported in the Advocate since its inception in September 1967. Each year receives a single chapter, with an opening essay by a prominent gay or lesbian journalist or author, a chronology of key events of the year, and a selection of articles drawn from the magazine. The book takes readers from a time when homosexuality was treated as a pathology, and when gays and lesbians were for the most part unorganized and deep in the closet, to 1992, when a vocal gay and lesbian movement helped elect Bill Clinton president. The book is relentlessly honest about the divisions within the gay and lesbian communities (particularly concerning the growing AIDS crisis as it broke in the mid-1980s) and earnestly self-critical in its evaluation of the magazine's coverage of many issues (shortchanging lesbians and people of color in its earlier days). Many interviews are excerpted, with subjects as diverse as Jesse Jackson, Christopher Isherwood, Milton Berle, and Michel Foucault. Readers can also see the Advocate itself evolve from a spirited amateurism into a magazine of exceptionally high journalistic standards. A useful and relatively comprehensive guide to nearly 30 years of gay and lesbian history, but one wishes for fewer and longer excerpts. Also, the magazine's excellent cartoonists get somewhat short shrift.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-09536-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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