A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.
An acclaimed historian and biographer returns with an intimate history of the AIDS crisis and its devastations.
Bancroft Prize winner Duberman (Emeritus, History/CUNY Graduate Center; Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left, 2012, etc.) employs an effective structure, focusing on two young men (both died of AIDS at age 38), one white (Michael Callen), the other black (Essex Hemphill), and alternating the narratives of their lives, pausing occasionally to sketch the experiences of other young men and to inject accounts of his own memories as a gay man. As the author notes, the amount of material on Callen is more plentiful, but he has unearthed some affecting information about Hemphill as well. Callen was much more aggressive about pursuing sexual experiences (more than 1,000 different partners), and he soon became involved in various musical groups and even managed to produce recordings near the end of his life. He also became an outspoken, sometimes-fiery, advocate for gay rights and for AIDS research. Duberman highlights the disgracefully slow responses of the government and the medical community to the spreading crisis. (The Reagan administration, in particular, comes under heavy attack.) Hemphill was a poet and essayist and wrote a draft of a novel that Duberman examines and analyzes. The author shows the reactions to AIDS in the black community, noting the slow acceptance of gay blacks in black churches, and he charts the various medical responses to the crisis—the fear, the uncertainty and the desperation to try just about anything. The politics, no surprise, are both complicated and unpleasant. Duberman also discusses the effect of AIDS announcements from Magic Johnson, Arthur Ashe and other notables. The final sections are hard to read as we witness the declines of two young men we’ve come to know and admire.
A powerful book that displays both the malice and the nobility of our species.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59558-945-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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