A daily journal of our lives (begun in October 2010), in photos (many taken by my wife, Evie) and words, mostly from our home on Chautauqua Lake, in Western New York, where my wife Evie and I live, after my having retired from teaching English for forty-five years in Hawaii, Turkey, and Ohio. We have three children, seven grandchildren, and one great-grandson, as you will notice if you follow my blog since we often travel to visit them. Photo from our porch taken on 11/03/2024 at 7:07 AM
Sunday, August 11, 2019
THE GREAT BELIEVERS: REBECCA MAKKAI
This book won many awards when it was published and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for 2018. It's really two stories, the first set in Chicago in the 1980s during the height of the HIV epidemic. We follow Yale Fishman, as he navigates the gay community, its fears, and trauma, as its members begin to die, their deaths ignored by the city and by the federal government under Ronald Reagan. It's a love story in some ways but always a tragic one. Besides Yale's story, we follow the life of Fiona Marcus. At the age of seventeen, her parents throw her older brother, Rico, out of the house because he is gay. This is the defining moment in her life as she dedicates her life to helping not only her brother but the gay community. Fiona's story is set thirty years later, as she arrives in Paris to find her daughter and granddaughter, estranged from Fiona since her teens. The reader moves back and forth between Yale, his life and loves in the 1980s and Fiona's search for her daughter, her granddaughter and her self. ****
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