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Paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN13: 9780312560850
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Known as “The Mayor of Castro Street” even before he was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk’s personal life, public career, and final assassination reflect the dramatic emergence of the gay community as a political power in America. It is a story full of personal tragedies and political intrigues, assassinations at City Hall, massive riots in the streets, the miscarriage of justice, and the consolidation of gay power and gay hope.
Harvey Milk has been the subject of numerous books and movies, including the Academy Award–winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk. His life is also the basis of a 2008 major motion picture, Milk, starring Sean Penn.
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| Decent but Movie Much Better |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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In "The Mayor of Castro Street," journalist Randy Shilts chronicles the life and times of Harvey Milk, who in less than five years would alter the landscape of local politics in San Francisco and, with his radicalism and with his assassination, bring gay rights into the fore-front of the American consciousness.
Randy Shilts with his books "And the Band Played on" and "The Mayor of Castro Street" memorializes San Francisco gay life in the seventies and early eighties. I've seen both HBO's very competent and solid television production of "And the Band Played on" and Gus Van Sant's movie "Milk," in which Sean Penn was both brilliant and mesmerizing as Harvey Milk. So I had high expectations when I begun this book, and because of these high expectations I was very disappointed.
There is nothing wrong with the book, but there's nothing commendable about it either. Mr. Shilts does a competent job of painting a psychological portrait of Harvey Milk, who suffered from a martyrdom complex: he rightly predicted that he would die before he turned fifty at the hands of a nutcase gay rights opponent. Milk had energy and resolve, and was a brilliant politician who changed gay politics forever in America by adeptly and sincerely building alliances with other constituencies. But he also suffered from anger and paranoia, and he constantly lashed out at his faithful lover and business partner Scott Smith. In his final five years he would channel this anger and paranoia via an impending sense of martyrdom into a self-righteous passion to promote the gay rights movement in San Francisco. Harvey Milk was actually angry when a proposition to make it illegal for homosexual teachers to teach in California public schools was shot down by a 75-25 margin in a referendum because he had hoped that the passing of the proposition would ignite gay riots across the state. He wanted a fiery beginning for the radical and violent gay rights movement in San Francisco so that it may burn across the entire nation, but in the end he had to settle for a fiery end to himself. It is the art of great biography to render a subject knowable and human, and here Mr. Shilts fails because we leave with the sense of Milk's passion but also of his weirdness. (Jim Jones and the People's
Temple play a large role in this biography, and it would've been interesting for Mr. Shilts to compare Milk and Jones.)
Mr. Shilts presents a realistic sense of San Francisco in the seventies, but we think it more a concept (the birthplace and incubator of the gay rights movement) rather than a city in which we can wander, lose ourselves, and actually enjoy. The author does a competent job in arguing the political impact of Harvey's rise (Milk taught the gay rights movement how to engage politics: witness how gays have turned a marginal disease - AIDS - into a mainstream global issue and a cause that generates billions of dollars a year) and of his fall (the gay rights movement lost its sense of passion and urgency, and returned to being divided and opportunistic). The author's greatest deficit is his writing style, which is bland and lifeless. All in all, the movie "Milk" is a much superior treatment of the man (mainly because of Sean Penn's performance), and the book on which it is based adds very little to the picture.
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| Harvey Milk |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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After seeing Gus Van Sant's compelling & marvelous production of 'Milk', I knew I had to read more about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in the US. Randy Shilt's volume is a definitive account of Milk's entire life, capturing fully the personality that drove a man to soaring heights & to inspire & demonstrate to those like him (et al.) that if you aren't given rights, to go ahead & take them! Harvey even predicted his own demise, but I wonder if that was just his theatrical personality speaking rather than a genuine fear (at least it wasn't expressed in a foreboding sense).
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| Harvey Milk: Pioneer |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Having lived in San Francisco off and on from 1968 through 1973, I was there for a good part of the time period covered by Randy Shilts' book, "The Mayor of Castro Street." Although I never met Harvey Milk personally, I was aware of his crusade and saw the effects of his political impact. He was a brave and courageous leader who was much more than a "gay supervisor." He cared about people, their lives, their needs, their quality of living. This book brought back a flood of memories of those days--of Haight-Ashbury, SIR, the "City" itself, and the tumultuous times that were the sixties and seventies. Much more than "just" a biography of Milk, Shilts captured the times, the places, the people, the events, and the mood. It is a classic and deserves to be on the bookshelves of every American who cares about equality, liberty, and freedom.
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| Remarkable both as a companion to the film and as a stand-alone. |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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After seeing "Milk," I was interested to learn more about Harvey than a two-hour Hollywood movie could offer. I couldn't have been happier to discover this book and I quickly devoured it. As the subtitle suggests, this is a book that is as much about America and the gay rights movement as it is about Harvey Milk. I had little idea about the plight of homosexuals in this country and Shilts does a masterful job of painting a chilling picture. More importantly, he also provides the proverbial warts-and-all representation of a complicated individual. As much as I loved the film, it is clearly something of a hagiography. You simply can't understand the man, the movement, or the time period without reading this incredible book. I couldn't recommend it more enthusiastically.
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| Inspirational and Devastating History |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Harvey Milk was a charismatic guy trying to get along in the world. His life was difficult--he was a gay man living in the 1970s, a time when gays were openly persecuted and hated by many. However, change was on the wind.
A large number of gay men were congregating in San Francisco, and there they were able to group together to fight for the rights they deserved. Harvey Milk was a controversial and unconventional leader of this movement. He was a polarizing force in San Francisco politics, making a great number of enemies as well as friends. By smart strategy and aligning himself with powerful groups of people, though, Milk was eventually elected as a Supervisor, a position which allowed him to fight for the legislature that would protect him and the other gays of San Francisco.
This book was a fascinating and extensive history of the gay movement, and it highlighted the reasons for the explosion of San Francisco as an important city. Harvey Milk himself was a compelling character, able to overcome great odds and keep picking himself up to fight the political fight. The tragedy of his murder and the aftermath of his death was infuriating and made me glad to think how far we've come since then, but discouraged at how far we still have to progress.
This was an excellent biography of an extraordinary man.
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