An important and touching account of a community’s struggles against LGBTQ+ discrimination.
A high school music teacher stands to lose his job after being outed as gay by a student in this work about LGBTQ+ rights.
Yared, an attorney, offers this true story about teacher Gerry Crane’s fight to keep his job at a public high school trying to force him out for being gay. The emotionally charged legal and personal fight began in 1995, the same year “Michigan Governor John Engler signed a law banning same-sex marriage and prohibiting the recognition of out-of-state same sex marriage.” Discrimination against LGBTQ+ citizens was legally endorsed, and a culture of homophobia was rife. A student of Crane’s, one he had disciplined, according to the author, obtained the program for the teacher’s ceremonial marriage to his partner, Randy, and shared it with the administration at Byron Center High School. The school, where Crane taught music and was recognized by students and the administration as an excellent teacher and role model, was “located in religiously and politically conservative West Michigan.” The administration used the town’s religious beliefs to fuel a homophobic battle to oust Crane, portraying him as morally unfit because he was gay. Yared rigorously shares the details of Crane’s struggle to defend his personal life and his courageous efforts to stand up to the school’s many attempts to force him to resign. Crane’s initial refusal to leave his teaching position was met with enmity from the town’s bigoted members but also with dedication and love from many of his students. Crane, a deeply religious man, became a champion for his LGBTQ+ students, closeted and fearful to come out in a hostile climate. Yared was formerly on the board of directors of the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Network of West Michigan. In presenting Crane’s inspiring story, the author skillfully depicts the culture of a time when personal protests and supportive communities joined forces against discrimination, paving the way for activists to earn more rights for LGBTQ+ citizens everywhere. The author’s prose is on the anecdotal side, missing opportunities to use rich descriptions to tell this compelling tale. Nevertheless, the moving book serves as a significant contribution to the history of protests that individuals have waged to improve the lives of all LGBTQ+ people.
An important and touching account of a community’s struggles against LGBTQ+ discrimination.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73523-710-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Penning History Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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