An obvious labor of love for the author and a moving tribute to the unsung heroes of the AIDS crisis.
Public speaker and activist Noe (Friend Grief and Men, 2016, etc.) chronicles the sometimes-overlooked efforts of women who helped battle the AIDS epidemic.
In 2014, the author attended a panel discussion that featured gay and straight women who played prominent roles in the fight against AIDS. She felt that their impassioned stories needed more widespread attention. In this book, she informatively writes about tireless support workers, such as Terri Wilder, who dedicated her life to AIDS activism and awareness, and the late activist Iris De La Cruz, as well as more famous public figures, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana. Other chapters focus on other women who were hospice volunteers, caregivers, mothers, pioneering researchers, and medical educators who were trained on the front lines of the epidemic. Many of these women were HIV-positive themselves and found that the system, with its consistent “lack of accurate, stigma-free sex education,” failed them, as it had the gay male community in the 1980s and ’90s. Noe writes proudly and engagingly of her own social and political advocacy and activism, including her work at a residential program for AIDS survivors, lobbying on Capitol Hill for the Ryan White Care Act in 1990, and joining ACT UP/NY in 2013. She remembers being known as a “fag hag” then, but she tells of how she learned to embrace that moniker. This essential book is most poignant when Noe channels the pain, loss, and helplessness of the 1980s, when AIDS-related hospital programs “did not have unanimous workplace support” and half of most primary care physicians refused to treat AIDS patients. Instead, she points out, men and women with AIDS had to rely on the kindness of strangers—people who nursed the ill, defended them, and, above all, loved them unconditionally. Noe’s book celebrates one sector of this compassionate network of caregivers with empathy, appreciation, solidarity, and immense pride.
An obvious labor of love for the author and a moving tribute to the unsung heroes of the AIDS crisis.Pub Date: March 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9903081-9-5
Page Count: 226
Publisher: King Company Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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