aimiller's Reviews (689)

Again, this book was... fine? It didn't do what I wanted it to do, which is not a hit against the author, but I would say it's a terrible title honestly, very misleading as to what it's about. I think the experiences and stories were interesting and maybe had it been organized as like an oral history of the aftermath of Matt Shepard's death, I would have found it more intriguing, but honestly any "analysis" was lost amid Loffreda's attempts to do the entire story "justice." I would say it wasn't a bad book, just not intellectually stimulating (but also not super relaxing.)

This book was interesting--I think I'd like to go back and read it again but with a copy I can write in, but I don't love it enough to buy it, if that makes any sense. To me, the earlier parts of the book were the most useful, though it was definitely an interesting read (I finished it in less than a day.) In some ways, though, it felt like 'just another piece of queer theory,' which is no real mark against it necessarily if that's what you're looking for I guess, but wasn't the most interesting thing in the world to me.

I intitially got this book for the title essay, but I'm really glad I read it all, because in some ways, it expands and makes legible what I found so frustrating about the first essay. (I will say, I've been ranking queer theorists--as much as Bersani resists that label--by how they make me feel; so far, it's Edelman makes me feel both stupid and angry, but Bersani makes me feel stupid but not angry.) I really think the rest of the book fleshes out what Bersani tries to say in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" which is good because to me, that essay feels massively unfinished. I will also say that it might really help your understanding of the book if you have a firmer grasp than I do on psychoanalytic theory (which is to say, any grasp at all.) I will probably be revisiting this again (I've already read the title essay three times, trying to understand it,) and am looking for people to talk with about it!

This book was... fine? It wasn't anything that took my breath away, though I did read it for a Project which invariably means that it doesn't give me exactly whatever I want to get out of it. Andriote spends a lot of time like... trying to suss out why gay male culture was the way it was at the time, and it reads like this really odd political choice that he was making. He seems to anticipate pushback for it, and maybe he deserves some (I'm not a gay man, I can't speak to intracommunity issues,) but it was just very weird to reflect on. In a lot of ways, it made me think about the essay by Allan Bérubé about AIDS, how trying to assign any meaning to it is just a pointless and very painful exercise. Otherwise, I had no real qualms about the book--it starts off as heavily costal, but he brushes up against responses to AIDS in Oklahoma, Chicago a little bit, Minnesota a little bit. It's still definitely coastal-heavy, but there are clear attempts to avoid an NYC and SF-specific story.

The most interesting chapter for my purposes was the one about memorialization--again, it's nothing super groundbreaking, but it is a decent sweeping look at the way that people grapple with death, so for an introduction for someone who is looking for more, I found it pretty decent. And that was kind of how I felt about the entire book? It was broad without being like a repetition of the other HIV/AIDS history books, though I think it helps to have a basic understanding of the timeline of the epidemic before you dive in, as it does rely on you having some previous knowledge. Overall, it was nothing that blew me away, but it did its job.

So I want to say upfront that I read this book mostly because somehow it ended up on my gay reads book list? And uh not to spoil anything, but I did not read any relationships that could be construed as gay, I don't think, unless you're counting the fact that Langston Hughes appears as like a Very Background Character? So if you, like me, had it up on one of those types of lists, uh... not that I could see.

That being said, this is one of those cases where I really really felt like knowing more about Canada in general and Quebec/Montreal in particular would have been helpful? I feel like I've read a lot of reviews where people are like "this is a gross misrepresentation of Black life in Montreal!" and I couldn't tell you if that was true or not. In a lot of ways, it feels like a book that is much older than it is--it was published in 1997, but there's some Baldwin-like aesthetic that Sarsfield really hits on, or maybe the like old melodramas (I'm thinking specifically of Imitation of Life, I think?) I literally flipped to the front matter to see when this book was published like 8 times over the course of reading the book.

But overall, I would say it wasn't a bad book--if that melodrama aesthetic was what Sarsfield was aiming for, I'd say she hit it out of the park in a major way! And if that kind of aesthetic is your thing, you probably really should check out this book! For the rest of us I'd say reading it is not the most necessary thing in the world, but it's not terrible either!

This book has a lot of things to talk about--questions about how narrative is produced and what shapes it, about the various scales and levels that seeming 'microhistories' can address, about the pursuit of truth. The format for me wasn't so much ingenious as like... made sense and yet also felt repetitive at some times, though I know other people feel differently. Despite questioning narratives, Piker does cling pretty heavily to questions of truth, so he doesn't career into like postmodern history or whatever, but that clinging to truth comes across as weird because he buries what he thinks happened in like the last third of the book.

I will say that he does good work with putting Creek sovereignty specifically at the forefront of the conflict he's writing about, which is something I've discovered other folks writing about Native people during the period are Not Great at, and the careful attention to details is impressive work. I guess overall I just wasn't super moved by this book because of personal taste--it's not my era, and I'm not super invested in questions about like 'how do we do the work we do when everything is produced with bias'. It might be useful for teaching undergrads at an upper level, but I think you can accomplish many of these lessons without it, it's sort of whatever for me.