An evocative rendering of committed lives.
Absorbing dual biography of two gay writer-activists who helped shape America’s left-wing radical community in the 1960s.
Bancroft Prize–winning historian Duberman (Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985–2008, 2009 etc.), founder of CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, writes with empathy about the personal and political lives of Barbara Deming (1917–84) and McReynolds, 81, longtime friends and allies in the disarmament, civil rights and antiwar movements. Deming, a contributor to Partisan Review and The Nation, grew up apolitical in an upper-middle-class Manhattan family, attended Bennington, read Gandhi and in 1960 plunged into protests on racial equality and other issues, eventually becoming a noted theorist of nonviolence. McReynolds, a decade younger, was a student radical at UCLA in the ’50s, a conscientious objector during the Korean War and rose to prominence at Liberation magazine and the War Resisters League, where he served for 45 years. Both wrestled with their homosexuality in the closeted pre-Stonewall years. Deming, battling to “claim my life as my own,” shared a complex, unstable love life with artist Mary Meigs and others, and after 1969 became a leading activist on feminist and gay issues. McReynolds, wracked by guilt and regret, often argued about his sexual orientation with his father and finally learned to accept it with the support of dancer friend Alvin Ailey. Drawing on letters and papers, Duberman offers incisive portraits of these deeply introspective intellectuals as they struggled to find love, intimacy and self-acceptance in a homophobic society and take courageous public stands against discrimination and injustice. The narrative occasionally bogs down in the details of internecine bickering within political groups, as lefties of the era—Bayard Rustin, A.J. Muste, Dave Dellinger and others—parade through the pages. McReynolds might as easily have been speaking for Deming when he wrote, “I am not a passive bystander—and that is what makes life exciting.”
An evocative rendering of committed lives.Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-323-9
Page Count: 366
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
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