A relevant, fiery, and dizzying treatise certain to provoke debate and discussion.
A provocative report on the progress of LGBTQ rights.
The driving force behind Duberman’s (The Rest of It: Cocaine, Hustlers, Depression, and Then Some, 1976-1988, 2018, etc.) astute, briskly written analysis is his “limited satisfaction with what most gay people are hailing as the speediest success story in all of our country’s long history of social protest.” After rereading the 1972 anthology Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, Duberman became inspired to argue against the current complacency of the culture which he believes has been resting on the successes of marriage liberties and limited civil rights. He highlights the type of activism represented by broadly radical coalitions like the Gay Liberation Front, created after the 1969 Stonewall riots, and contrasts it with the narrowed focus of the current resistance. The author’s broad historical knowledge shows in his discussions of the movement’s ties to the Black Panthers and the Latino community as well as his profile of influential trans activist Sylvia Rivera. Duberman’s focus veers outward to illuminate the strengths and successes of the gay marriage agenda but also notes how it feels misguided in areas of class status and socio-economic advantage. The author uses experiences from his own “accomplished life” history as intimate examples while echoing the arguments of activist and journalist Michelangelo Signorile. However, the middle section of the book, which debates the origins of homosexuality, is awkwardly placed within the context of his primary discussion. With a mix of seasoned insight and palpable frustration, Duberman pleads his case for unity and togetherness within the LGBTQ community and across other societal and cultural groups, which must join forces for the common goal of equality and tolerance. The author’s exhilarating conclusion demonstrates a distinctive scholarship of gay liberation history and his familiarity with the “shriveled posture of the movement in its present guise.” Duberman challenges gay readers and their allies to become active within a complex caucus he feels has become unfocused and misled.
A relevant, fiery, and dizzying treatise certain to provoke debate and discussion.Pub Date: June 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-520-29886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
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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