An ambitious but overly optimistic history.
Retired labor lawyer and professor Hirshman (Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, 2006, etc.) celebrates the triumph of the gay-rights movement.
Drawing on previous histories and more than 100 interviews, the author shows how the movement has been successful over the years in countering bigoted notions of the “four horsemen of the gay apocalypse—Crazy, Sinful, Criminal, [and] Disloyal.” Hirshman is most engaged in her discussions of court cases and their attendant legal issues, and on occasion she offers perceptive comparisons between the gay-rights movement and other, concurrent movements for equality. Often, however, the author draws on previous texts while adding few new insights, giving the book a warmed-over feeling. She relies too heavily on George Chauncey’s exhaustive Gay New York (1994) as a source for her chapter on the early urban gay experience, and her relatively brief take on the 1969 Stonewall riots makes excessive use of David Carter’s Stonewall (2004). As Hirshman makes clear, there have been great strides for the gay-rights movement, particularly in the last few decades, with major U.S. Supreme Court victories and the legalization of same-sex marriage in several states. But it seems strangely naive, even myopic, for the author to claim the movement “triumphant” when so many antigay laws at the state and federal level remain, and so much open homophobia persists in much of the country. (Even one of Hirshman’s interview subjects asked her, “Do you really think you ought to call it Victory?”) While many readers will admire her enthusiasm, a pronouncement of ultimate victory seems premature at best.
An ambitious but overly optimistic history.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-196550-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
