An important story of a great civil rights battle told in exhaustive detail.
A journalist and political science professor chronicles the fight for same-sex marriage from its beginnings through the presidential candidacy of Pete Buttigieg.
In 1990, three same-sex couples applied “on a lark” for Hawaii marriage licenses. The inevitable rejection set in motion a cascade of legal and political challenges that culminated in the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage throughout the U.S. In this exceptionally comprehensive but overlong and inefficiently organized account, Issenberg, Washington correspondent for the Monocle, shows how the movement lurched forward through triumphs in states like Vermont and Massachusetts and seemingly fatal setbacks such as Bill Clinton’s signing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996. Advocates of marriage equality had to overcome not just political and religious foes—among them, Catholic bishops, Protestant evangelicals, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—but conflicts in their own ranks between incrementalists willing to settle for civil unions and those who saw anything less than marriage as second-class status for same-sex couples. The movement prevailed with the help of courageous opponents such as Dan Foley, a Buddhist attorney who took on the Hawaii marriage-license applicants as clients after chanting about it; and Mary Bonauto, a lawyer for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, whom former congressman Barney Frank called “our Thurgood Marshall.” Issenberg’s encyclopedic narrative, though written well on the sentence level, has an inelegant structure that reveals an author unable or unwilling to necessarily condense the narrative (at least 200 pages could have been cut). He also includes too many unedifying details, including an attempt to put Barack Obama’s support for gay rights in context in part by stating, “Both Obama’s high-school drug dealer and favorite college professor were gay men.” Future journalists or historians will likely offer more efficient histories, but Issenberg’s research makes the book a vital source for bookstores, libraries, and LGBTQ studies completists.
An important story of a great civil rights battle told in exhaustive detail.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-524-74873-9
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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
A harrowing memoir of grief and love.
An indelible portrait of a mother’s courage.
Award-winning novelist McCann and Foley, mother of murdered journalist James Wright Foley (1973-2014), offer a powerful recounting of the unspeakable tragedy and its aftermath. In August 2014, after being held hostage for two years, Jim was beheaded by Islamic Group terrorists. He had been taken hostage once before, in Libya, but that time was released after 44 days. Undaunted, he went to Syria “determined to bear witness to the horrific bombings and gassings of innocent civilians by the Assad regime.” After he was taken hostage, the Foley family, to their deepening dismay, discovered that the U.S. refused unequivocally to negotiate for hostages’ release, and the Foleys were threatened with prosecution if they tried to raise ransom money on their own. Meanwhile, though, through “an incredibly circuitous route,” several European governments managed to free their own hostages. “They insinuated themselves carefully into the communications system,” the authors write, “got under the umbrella of the emails, and forged their own secret methods that included a network of agents and ambassadors and, yes, even spies.” Foley vents her anger toward the many government officials who claimed they were powerless to help. “The plain fact of the matter is that we don’t care as much for our aid workers or our volunteer ambulance drivers or our journalists as we do for our military,” the authors assert. Foley and her family founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for the freedom of those taken hostage or detained abroad, and she takes hope from recent legislation, most recently by Biden’s executive order, in support of hostages. Hoping for “answers to help her in the wider work against hostage-taking,” Foley met with one of the terrorists involved in her son’s murder—unsettling encounters that bracket the striking narrative.
A harrowing memoir of grief and love.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9798985882452
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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