Though it could have been even more diverse in its presentation, this is an encouraging and deeply compelling study of how...
A San Francisco–based clinical psychologist explores how gay men construct fulfilling lives through self-acceptance and an awareness of their individual core instincts.
With an understanding of the difficult challenges gay men face in America, Odets (In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS, 1995) shares case studies and personal stories from his years working during the AIDS epidemic and the aftermath. These serve as examples to help gay men consider how they can move beyond negative family and societal influences to live more satisfying lives. The author views gay men as living in “tripartite communities, with significant psychological and social differences that define each group”: older-group, middle-group, and younger-group men, each defined by age and social awareness in relation to the AIDS epidemic, from the often fatal trauma of the early years to the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in 1996 and to the more technologically advanced present era. Odets closely examines the negative impacts of early life experiences, often triggered by a lack of family and/or community acceptance, and stresses the need for self-acceptance in order to move forward. “Self-acceptance allows realistic self-confidence, which is significantly unhinged in adulthood from the expectations and approval of others,” he writes. “In the end, authentic self-acceptance—or lack of it—is almost the entirety of what defines a life.” The author’s writing is perceptive and honest, as he openly discusses relationships and sex and accurately relates the struggles each generation has experienced. These reflect both similarities as well as differences and the difficulties in finding a genuine sense of community, especially within urban gay meccas. Odets convincingly argues for the benefits of talk therapy, with each story revealing how some level of personal growth was achieved. One issue: Though his cases reflect a broad range of ethnic and racial examples, the overwhelming majority of his profiles are about affluent individuals, all of whom can afford years of ongoing therapy.
Though it could have been even more diverse in its presentation, this is an encouraging and deeply compelling study of how gay men can build meaningful identities.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28585-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
PROFILES
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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