A significant educational and motivational tribute to dozens of social justice heroes.
A dignified tapestry of trailblazing pioneers who have contributed to the gay liberation movement.
Funk’s nonprofit OUTWORDS is an initiative dedicated to recording and preserving the stories and histories of LGBTQ revolutionaries. Among the dynamic voices featured in his empowering anthology are activists, leaders, and individual contributors who represent the struggle of LGBTQ people to be heard above the perennial din of intolerance, discrimination, and hate. Recognizing that many of the pioneers are baby boomers and that there will be “fewer of our elders around to interview,” the author briskly traveled across America arranging interviews for a volume he knew would “do justice to the long, complex journey that our community has traveled.” Split into 10 thematic sections, the collection begins with community-focused individuals like Emma Colquitt-Sayers, a Dallas-based organizer who overcame the ravages of a difficult childhood to emerge successful and immensely philanthropic. Other contributors include former Los Angeles nightclub owners Jewel Thais-Williams, whose Catch One bar was born during the sexual revolution, and Gene La Pietra, who consistently thwarted rampant anti-gay police brutality at his venues (he recalls one night when “the cops game in with billy clubs flying…helicopters, the whole nine yards…giving out commands just like Nazis”). Many of these diverse voices come from transgender activists, and others have legal, political, or performance backgrounds and media, military, and ministerial affiliations. “Pioneering protester” Dick Leitsch recalls rushing to the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 to witness the riots firsthand, and organizer Donna Red Wing’s posthumous profile reflects her lifelong dedication to humanitarian equality. Many of these stories are highly introspective and poignant—e.g., interviews with several longtime AIDS survivors and a few spirited octogenarians—while some are humorous, including that of drag queen Bradley Picklesimer’s trajectory from Chess King–wearing youth to Hollywood performance artist. To Funk, each voice is essential, and “if we hurry, we can record many more stories—and thank our pioneers in person.”
A significant educational and motivational tribute to dozens of social justice heroes.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-257170-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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