Elevate Difference

Reviews by Gemma Cooper-Novack

Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America

In this well-written ethnography, Gay Fatherhood, Ellen Lewin examines the choices and the decisions of gay fathers in America, focusing particularly on men who choose to become fathers as gay men, rather than coming out after having had children in a different-sex marriage.

Abby and Jules

Early in Lia Quince’s novel Abby and Jules, adolescent protagonist Abby steps onto a street in Beijing on her own for the first time. She is conflicted, carrying both the naïve adolescent confidence that she can survive alone in any city and the awareness that she is a white woman in China. The swirl of teenage emotions is thoughtfully captured. Unfortunately, this one moment is the high point of the novel.

Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent

Even the preface to Unsafe for Democracy makes William H. Thomas Jr.’s political stances abundantly clear, but impressively, his political leanings have no negative effect on either his literary voice or his scholarship.

All Fall Down

The topical variety of the stories contained in Mary Caponegro’s All Fall Down is close to astounding. Her protagonists are women, men, and children. Her stories consider poesy, abortion, marriage, chronic illness, terrorism, pregnancy, lesbianism, and international travel—all with grace and interest and without a hitch.

Miss Conduct’s Mind Over Manners: Master the Slippery Rules of Modern Ethics and Etiquette

Miss Conduct is an exemplary advice columnist: quirky, direct, and practical. Her quirkiness throws her biases into the forefront, preventing any false pretense of neutrality, and allows her to emphasize a pleasant sense of humor.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness

We rarely have the opportunity to hear from people diagnosed with schizophrenia. As a result, the disease remains misunderstood and maligned, confused with multiple personality disorder, and the butt of several jokes. In writing The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks has, in part, set out to remedy this, and she has acquitted herself most admirably. Saks’s life is an interesting one.

How the Religious Right Shaped Lesbian and Gay Activism

While leftists and gay rights activists occasionally discuss the notion that left wing battles, and particularly GLBTQ struggles, are too influenced by the religious right, the complaint is always frustrated and dismissive, never a serious consideration. Tina Fetner approaches the notion differently, addressing how the influence of religious right was, in fact, invaluable in shaping, and in rendering more powerful, the lesbian and gay movement.

When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided By Race

It would be hard to find a story more inherently dramatic than that of Sandra Laing, one that can show in a more complete and complex manner the ramifications of South Africa’s apartheid regime. With coloring distinctly different from that of her white family, Sandra Laing was expelled from her white school in 1965 and reclassified as “coloured” (of mixed-race descent), then, after her family engaged in legal battle, was made ‘white” once again; in the throes of this conflict, at the age of fifteen, Laing fell in love and ran away with a black man, with whom she had several children.

Beyond the Icarus Factor: Releasing the Free Spirit of Boys

It seems that every year for the last fifteen or so, children of one gender or another are considered neglected, voiceless, constrained by social mores. In neither case is the notion wrong, but rarely are all the social implications put together.

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation?

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? is a history of post-Stonewall GLBTQ activism as seen through three focused battles: the AIDS crisis, the ban on gays in the military, and the conflict over gay marriage. Craig Rimmerman presents a detailed breakdown of each, assembling them into a supposed study of the differences and relative importance of assimilationist and liberationist strategies.

Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974

Between 2002’s documentary The Weather Underground and such novels as Russell Banks’s The Darling, the radical revolutionary group ironically returned to the public eye in recent years. Thirty years after their underground activities ended, now that all the charges have been dropped and all of the living members of the organization have joined the establishment, albeit on the fringes (Dohrn, Ayers and Jones have become a legal scholar, an educational philosopher and an environmental activist respectively), Sing a Battle Song offers a complex, bittersweet perspective on The Weather Underground’s life and revolutionary work.

Domain of Perfect Affection

The title of Robin Becker’s new book is contained in the last line of “Salon,” where the speaker’s mother goes for her weekly respite. In this “domain of perfect affection,” _ … my mother attends to the lifelong business of revealing and withholding, careful to frame each story while Vivienne lacquers each nail and then inspects each slender finger … Such delicate observations permeate the straightforward observations throughout the collection. Few poets achieve this mastery: Becker makes everyday observations, everyday knowledge, extraordinary.
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