Among recent books by gay men, defining gay male identity under the shadow of AIDS, these hard-edged essays stand out for their persisting faith in the redemptive power of self-determined sexual expressiveness. Hardy, a much published journalist and essayist in the gay community, died in a mountain-climbing accident before he could complete the seven essays assembled here. His friend, David Groff (formerly an editor with Crown), finished the book and edited it for publication. Hardy’s unargued premise is that ‘’ ‘gay’ is the construction of identity through sexual relations.” Out of this beginning, the themes of the essays unfold and the tone that characterizes them, reminiscent of Nietzsche, of tragic, iconoclastic heroism. For if gay identity is liberated homosexual desire, then AIDS has all but squashed it; hence the crisis of desire—really of identity—that supplies the title. How should gay men behave, especially the HIV-positive among them (which included Hardy), when a viral accident of nature undermines their identity? They can: protest and subvert the slow response of medical science to their plight (this response comes in the longest and least persuasive chapter); practice imaginatively reconceived safer sex; opt to die—if the virus has advanced too painfully far within them—as Hardy touchingly shows a friend do in Holland, where physician-assisted suicide is legal; work to memorialize themselves across time (the model for which, in Hardy’s eyes, is not the AIDS quilt but annihilated, medieval French heretics, the Albigensians, whose memory still survives in southern France). What Hardy commends in all these choices is the free and self-determining spirit in which they are made. What does not pass muster is capitulations to ideas foreign and false to gay male identity, as Hardy conceives it, such as long-term relations patterned on heterosexual marriage or resigned acceptances of death. Readers should not be misled by the surface stridency of these essays, which plumb depths of vulnerability as universally human as they are distinctly gay.
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-74544-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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