A provocative and insightful look to the past for solutions to enhance and survive the future.
Learning from queer history.
Ensor, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin, examines the correlation between climate degradation and environmental futures and how the enduring qualities of the queer community have enabled its resistance and survival across decades of turmoil and demonization. Her primary concern is the future and the sustainability of humankind amid environmental deterioration beneath an increasing limitation of critical resources. With an academic’s eye, Ensor juxtaposes dire “futurelessness” scenarios encountered and eventually surmounted by the queer community and contrasts them against deteriorating conditions within our modern world in order to gain a deeper understanding into methods of repair. She focuses on two particular historical periods and their inherent literature: the 1890s, which saw “the birth of the homosexual ‘as a species,’” and the 1980s, when the global LGBTQ+ population confronted “extinction events” and was threatened and then decimated to great degrees. Yet, she notes, as patchworked communities, they became resilient enough to overcome terminal circumstances and, somehow, thrive. To Ensor, these lessons can be applied to more modern and troubling instances with regard to environmental cataclysms such as nuclear disasters or when considering the “futurelessness” of a global pandemic. The author draws inspiration from exploring the intricate choreography and “urban intimacies” of gay cruising and from “queer extinction” texts by Willa Cather, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Monette, poet Melvin Dixon, and many others, and she is consistently and dramatically informed by vast archives of AIDS literature. Ensor’s prose is scholarly, so much of the text is best suited to a more academic readership. Despite this, her message remains vivid as she effectively speculates on how the future of environmentalism and humanity in general can benefit from intensively and thoughtfully probing episodes of queer pain, struggle, resistance, and resurgence.
A provocative and insightful look to the past for solutions to enhance and survive the future.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781479829477
Page Count: 280
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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