Embedded within this heavily detailed chronicle of the American gay rights movement(s) between 1969 and 1992 are openings of bright clarity onto the complex, sometimes self-divided evolution of gay and lesbian activism. Clendinen and Nagourney, both New York Times journalists, chose their subtitle well: Their book focuses on such political (not social-service or cultural) organizations and their leaders as the Gay Liberation Front, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. However, the authors’ claim for their book, that it uniquely recounts the history of gay activism since 1969, is dated, in view of John Loughery’s Other Side of Silence (1998), which includes within its more intellectually nuanced history of gay male identity some of the political developments described here (such as the Supreme Court case of Bowers v. Harwick, upholding state laws against “sodomy,” and the countervailing passage of gay rights bills). What Clendinen and Nagourney additionally incorporate are: attention to lesbian activism and to such sometimes forgotten midwestern cities as Chicago and Minneapolis; pivotal moments in the rise of gay political consciousness, such as the first national gay fund-raising campaign (to help arson victims in New Orleans, 1973); and the dialectics of political success and failure (Anita Bryant’s antigay rhetoric in Florida energized gay activism nationally). Though the lengthy documentation of personal politics within the organizations discussed is wearing, it contextualizes the tensions the authors expose, with impartial sympathy, between gay men and lesbians, blacks and whites, and conservatives and radicals within the gay rights movements—oppositions that do not often receive, as they do here, the candid discussion they deserve. In that regard, the chapter on Jesse Jackson’s ambivalent speech to the Human Rights Campaign Fund in 1983 is a highlight. Readers who can navigate the journalistic density of sometimes anecdotal fact and quotation will be rewarded with a richer sense of recent gay history.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-81091-3
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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
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
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