This handsomely produced large-format volume traces over 25 years of the gay and lesbian movement's history through the pages of its foremost newsmagazine, the Advocate. (Thompson is senior editor). This is an appropriate choice for the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, generally considered the birth of the modern gay and lesbian movement in the US. Going year by year, this volume offers a survey of major political, cultural, social, and medical events in the history of the gay and lesbian movement, as reported in the Advocate since its inception in September 1967. Each year receives a single chapter, with an opening essay by a prominent gay or lesbian journalist or author, a chronology of key events of the year, and a selection of articles drawn from the magazine. The book takes readers from a time when homosexuality was treated as a pathology, and when gays and lesbians were for the most part unorganized and deep in the closet, to 1992, when a vocal gay and lesbian movement helped elect Bill Clinton president. The book is relentlessly honest about the divisions within the gay and lesbian communities (particularly concerning the growing AIDS crisis as it broke in the mid-1980s) and earnestly self-critical in its evaluation of the magazine's coverage of many issues (shortchanging lesbians and people of color in its earlier days). Many interviews are excerpted, with subjects as diverse as Jesse Jackson, Christopher Isherwood, Milton Berle, and Michel Foucault. Readers can also see the Advocate itself evolve from a spirited amateurism into a magazine of exceptionally high journalistic standards. A useful and relatively comprehensive guide to nearly 30 years of gay and lesbian history, but one wishes for fewer and longer excerpts. Also, the magazine's excellent cartoonists get somewhat short shrift.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-09536-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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