A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.
An acclaimed historian and biographer returns with an intimate history of the AIDS crisis and its devastations.
Bancroft Prize winner Duberman (Emeritus, History/CUNY Graduate Center; Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, 2012, etc.) employs an effective structure, focusing on two young men (both died of AIDS at age 38), one white (Michael Callen), the other black (Essex Hemphill), and alternating the narratives of their lives, pausing occasionally to sketch the experiences of other young men and to inject accounts of his own memories as a gay man. As the author notes, the amount of material on Callen is more plentiful, but he has unearthed some affecting information about Hemphill as well. Callen was much more aggressive about pursuing sexual experiences (more than 1,000 different partners), and he soon became involved in various musical groups and even managed to produce recordings near the end of his life. He also became an outspoken, sometimes-fiery, advocate for gay rights and for AIDS research. Duberman highlights the disgracefully slow responses of the government and the medical community to the spreading crisis. (The Reagan administration, in particular, comes under heavy attack.) Hemphill was a poet and essayist and wrote a draft of a novel that Duberman examines and analyzes. The author shows the reactions to AIDS in the black community, noting the slow acceptance of gay blacks in black churches, and he charts the various medical responses to the crisis—the fear, the uncertainty and the desperation to try just about anything. The politics, no surprise, are both complicated and unpleasant. Duberman also discusses the effect of AIDS announcements from Magic Johnson, Arthur Ashe and other notables. The final sections are hard to read as we witness the declines of two young men we’ve come to know and admire.
A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59558-945-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
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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