Fertile minds at work, pulling the political out of the personal, challenging gay discrimination from every angle—a body of...
A diversity of voices from “brave and useful souls,” as Gore Vidal calls them in the foreword, that attest to the rich, and mostly recent, literature of gay and lesbian politics compiled here by Bull (Perfect Enemies, 1996, etc.).
Each of these 46 pieces has the political crunch of a broadside. The material is arranged chronologically, starting with a great inclusive hug from Walt Whitman, jumping 52 years to Emma Goldman’s recognition of “various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life,” and proceeding through the clinical pathways of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud until offerings start coming in thick and fast with the 1950s. Norman Mailer weighs in with an essay on homosexual rights that, “while honorable as a piece of work, is dressed in the gray of lugubrious caution,” but which nonetheless “helped to blow up a log jam of accumulated timidities and restraints.” After Susan Sontag stakes out the boundaries of “camp,” a fistful of manifestos usher in the ’70s, including a short but provocative item by Adrienne Rich on the power of literature to tether her lesbianism to the earth. Harvey Milk tenders warm urgings to seek political office; Michel Foucault holds forth on sex and the production of power; Vidal pours hot soup into the lap of Midge Dexter, whose essay on homosexuality in Commentary, “for sheer vim and vigor . . . outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Joann Wypijewski closes the collection with an investigative report on the murder of Matthew Shepard, from which readers will exit knowing they have had revealed to them an unmistakable time, place, and people.
Fertile minds at work, pulling the political out of the personal, challenging gay discrimination from every angle—a body of writing all movements ache for.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-325-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
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