A second well-intentioned collection of speeches by an HIV- positive artist and mother who first gained national attention by addressing the 1992 Republican National Convention. AIDS activist Fisher (Sleep with the Angels, 1993) has a straightforward message: Everyone is at risk for AIDS, and everyone with HIV or AIDS deserves compassion and support. There are no ``innocent'' or ``guilty'' means of HIV transmission, she admirably insists; the only thing ``evil'' in the AIDS crisis is the ignorance that allows HIV to keep spreading. Fisher delivered the book's first speech at a September 1993 memorial service for her former husband, from whom she contracted the virus (she was diagnosed after they were divorced). Over the subsequent 14 months documented here she spoke to an impressively diverse array of audiences, including Christian and Jewish congregations, female convicts, AIDS caregivers, an FDA committee on home testing for HIV, and a capacity crowd at a San Francisco Giants game. Even in a talk given at an American Jewish Committee tribute to her father, industrialist Max M. Fisher, she deftly works in her compassionate message about AIDS. As polished by her collaborator, A. James Heynen (credited in the acknowledgments, if not on the title page), the speeches have some eloquent moments. But many of the rhetorical devices that might work when said aloud seem stilted on paper, particularly when recycled from speech to speech: Fisher's awkward description of people with HIV as ``pilgrims on the road to AIDS,'' for instance, becomes no more graceful after a half-dozen repetitions. The inclusion of photos of the author's two small, cute children at the start of each speech is sentimental overkill. Fisher can only be applauded for pursuing a necessary humanitarian mission; readers with a fairly high tolerance for the tics of inspirational lit should find her testimonials touching.
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80074-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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