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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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