Free The Mayor Of Castro Street: The Life And Times Of Harvey Milk Ebooks To Download
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.
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (October 14, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312560850
ISBN-13: 978-0312560850
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.1 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #241,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #15 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > LGBT > Gay #89 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > History #325 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > Gay & Lesbian
Harvey Milk has become, deservedly, something of a legend in the gay rights movement and in the broader history of San Francisco politics. In The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, Randy Shilts attempts to separate man from myth and then put it back together again. The result is a book which is accessible to both a casual and more academic audience.Shilts's writing style is fresh and casual. It is almost as though the man were sitting in a room having a conversation with you. Episodes are presented as a series of stories that flow throughout the book. So for example, we learn what Milk's lover Scott was doing when he heard the news of his assassination. The writing style lends itself well to a biography and works to make Milk more "human" than might otherwise be achieved.Shilts's writing style can be somewhat problematic, however, in that the story does not necessarily flow in a linear fashion. For the reader who is interested in the story of Milk from a conceptual or casual interest, this should not be a problem. It could be more problematic, however, for the academic reader looking for a better picture of the linear timeline. A timeline in the appendices of this book would have served this purpose well.Perhaps one of the greatest joys of this book, however, is reading about Milk's fight in his own words. Shilts includes transcripts of some of Milk's more famous speeches in which we learn a great deal about Milk's political beliefs and his thought process in those short months immediately preceeding and during his tenure as Supervisor. These speeches, included in the appendix, should not be skipped as they will help to ground the concepts discussed throughout the biography.
Author Randy Shilts was a journalist before he became a best selling author (And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military). His chronicling of the life of Harvey Milk from New York to San Francisco bears witness to the everyman struggles of gay men of that period. From the arrests and harassments in bars to the ultimate victory of being the first gay man elected to United Sates office, Shilts details every aspect of Milk's life. People famous then and now supplied detailed information on the kind of human being that Harvey Milk truly was. (Mind you, this book was written in the early eighties).Told in a quickly paced and unrelentingly thorough style, Shilts shows how an ordinary man like Milk can make a global change (all after age forty). Milk did this before he was assassinated, making his story all the more intriguing, tragic and poetic. The recent Gus Van Sant film does a great service to the novel, but Shilts is the one that truly gets under the skin of Harvey Milk and displays a man full of integrity, conviction and humility. In his reporter's style, Shilts also describes Milk's associates, friends and coworkers, pulling together the fabric of a life cut far too short.
The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk Fidel Castro & the Cuban Revolution for Kids!: The Amazing and Controversial Story of Fidel Castro & the Cuban Revolution An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk's Speeches and Writings Medications & Mothers' Milk (Medications and Mother's Milk) The Mayor of MacDougal Street [2013 edition]: A Memoir Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag Uncommon Friends: Life with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel, and Charles Lindbergh Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf The Griffin and the Dinosaur: How Adrienne Mayor Discovered a Fascinating Link Between Myth and Science The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba The Declarations of Havana (Revolutions Series): Tariq Ali presents Fidel Castro Fidel Castro: A Spoken Autobiography From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969 Ford Nation: Two Brothers, One Vision-The True Story of the People's Mayor What Does a Mayor Do? (How Our Government Works (Paper))
