Duberman (History/CUNY) follows up his widely admired Stonewall (1993) with a sequence of gripe-filled autobiographical essays about the decade after the Stonewall riots. In a preface, Duberman says he wanted to intermingle passages from his '70s diary with essays about the time, identifying and amplifying thematic connections between public and private life in order to ``lay bare the limits of reliable historical memory.'' The method fails. Duberman was a leader in gay-rights organizations and campaigned hard for gay visibility in academia for much of the decade, but the conflicts between radical leftists and conservative reformers in the gay movement have been detailed elsewhere, far more cogently and without the obsessive gnawing at old grievances that suffuses the first half of this book. The author quotes from his own articles, diaries, and letters, but he seems to be not so much assembling different perspectives as combing his past writings for showy one-liners. He attempts to persuade us that his playwriting career was thwarted by a homophobic conspiracy of producers and influential critics, but the discussion comes off as self-serving. Having portrayed a public atmosphere bereft of intellectual vigor and full of petty procedural squabbles, Duberman takes up his private life in several comparatively straightforward chapters about emotional crises. When he delves into the protoNew Age forms of psychotherapy he pursued, he occasionally captures his own odd moods and those of the decade with genuine resonance. But the real-world details that vivify a memoir elude Duberman: his relationships and ``sexual adventuring'' are described almost entirely as abstract concepts, and though he taught college and lived in New York for the entire period under discussion, the details of his nonpolitical, nonacademic interests—home, friends, ordinary routine—remain ciphers. Duberman talks about his habit of overrationalizing, which often made him miss out on full understanding of his emotional experiences. His book is crippled by the same flaw.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81836-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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