Kaplan delivers a well-rounded, informative, and illuminating perspective on the complexities of nontraditional marriage.
A key litigator who argued and helped defeat the Defense of Marriage Act describes the process, the politics, and the history behind the watershed Supreme Court ruling.
In 2009, private attorney Kaplan agreed to represent Edith Windsor, a former computer programming whiz whose wife of 44 years, Thea Spyer, had recently died. Though the couple had married legally in Canada, their union was not recognized in the United States, leaving Windsor owing thousands of dollars in estate taxes as the sole heir to her late wife’s holdings. Kaplan personalizes the narrative with an account of her coming-out process in 1991 as a Harvard and Columbia University graduate and the daughter of a homophobic mother. The author openly shares the timeline of her own marriage to political activist Rachel Lavine as well as a “rainbow coalition” of gutsy LGBT legal advocates and the many cases incrementally paving the way toward equal rights. Kaplan also fondly recognizes the extraordinary connection she’d previously had with Spyer, who had been her psychotherapist when she was a young lesbian. As the heavily publicized lawsuit proceeded against DOMA, which essentially considered the couple “legal strangers,” Kaplan’s oral arguments before Supreme Court justices, bolstered by Windsor’s affidavits, proved a victorious combination and opened the door for further same-sex equality measures. Equally engaging is the story of the genesis of Windsor and Spyer’s four-decade romance, a love that persevered despite the closeted 1950s era from which it emerged. Published on the heels of the 2015 landmark Supreme Court same-sex marriage legalization ruling, Kaplan’s narrative is accessible and provides a greater understanding and valuing of the great strides and sacrifices made on behalf of same-sex civil rights.
Kaplan delivers a well-rounded, informative, and illuminating perspective on the complexities of nontraditional marriage.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24867-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
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PERSPECTIVES
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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