Informative, heartbreaking, and inspiring.
A comprehensive sociopolitical history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic through an American lens.
“Today, more than one million people in the United States have HIV. About 30,000 people are infected each year, and the highest rates of infection are among Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and people who live in poor communities,” writes Long. These statistics show how timely this book is, challenging the view that the threat from HIV/AIDS ended decades ago. In “Basic Facts,” the opening section, the author uses precise, value-neutral language to answer questions readers might have. In 10 subsequent sections, he packs in well-researched accounts of various individuals and collectives responsible for demanding swift, affordable, and inclusive healthcare for people with AIDS. In addition to well-known groups, like ACT UP and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the book celebrates initiatives such as Blood Sisters (“a group of lesbian women in San Diego who designated their blood donations for local gay men”) and Mothers of AIDS Patients. This work will provide readers with hope as they learn about their fierce ancestors who fought for dignity in the face of institutionalized homophobia from the government and medical establishment. Long clearly shows how these activists effectively asserted their right to have a say in their own healthcare through marches, civil disobedience, fundraising and the arts. Photographs throughout enhance the storytelling by providing glimpses of the passionate and committed organizing that forced America to act against AIDS.
Informative, heartbreaking, and inspiring. (notes, image credits, index) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324053538
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a...
A lovely, lively historical survey that takes in Neanderthals, Hohenzollerns and just about everything in between.
In 1935, Viennese publisher Walter Neurath approached Gombrich, who would go on to write the canonical, bestselling Story of Art, to translate a history textbook for young readers. Gombrich volunteered that he could do better than the authors, and Neurath accepted the challenge, provided that a completed manuscript was on his desk in six weeks. This book, available in English for the first time, is the happy result. Gombrich is an engaging narrator whose explanations are charming if sometimes vague. (Take the kid-friendly definition of truffles: “Truffles,” he says, “are a very rare and special sort of mushroom.” End of lesson.) Among the subjects covered are Julius Caesar (who, Gombrich exults, was able to dictate two letters simultaneously without getting confused), Charlemagne, the American Civil War, Karl Marx, the Paris Commune and Kaiser Wilhelm. As he does, he offers mostly gentle but pointed moralizing about the past, observing, for instance, that the Spanish conquest of Mexico required courage and cunning but was “so appalling, and so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it,” and urging his young readers to consider that perhaps not all factory owners were as vile as Marx portrayed them to be, even though the good owners “against their conscience and their natural instincts, often found themselves treating their workers in the same way”—which is to say, badly.
Conversational, sometimes playful—not the sort of book that would survive vetting by school-system censors these days, but a fine conception and summarizing of the world’s checkered past for young and old.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-300-10883-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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