Bücher veröffentlicht von Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

As our country struggles to accept its gay and lesbian citizens, the debate for gay civil rights often focuses on the issue of choice, with the majority of Americans believing that to be gay is a choice, one that's embraced for its lifestyle. This belief ignores the presence and experience of one segment of the gay and lesbian population: its youth. In Joining The Tribe, journalist Linnea Due travels America to create a portrait of gay and lesbian teenagers as an endangered and vulnerable community whose diversity, courage, and resiliency will inspire gay and straight readers alike. By vividly documenting the lives of gay and lesbian teenagers, Due shows that homosexuality is not about choice. It's about fights in the schoolyard, whispers in the locker room, cruel classmates, and oblivious or abusive parents. Most gay and lesbian youth endure severe humiliation and isolation for being gay, resulting in depression and low self-esteem for most, and suicide for some. Combining in-depth interviews with social analysis, Due reveals the realities gay and lesbian teenagers face, often without the support of family, peer groups, or adult gay and lesbian networks. With stories from across America, Due meets kids from a range of backgrounds and families, with some in the closet, some out, most somewhere-in-between, all struggling to grow into adulthood. By turns heartbreaking and infuriating, Joining The Tribe shows how against overwhelming odds, gay and lesbian teenagers continue to survive and bounce back, ready to join their brothers and sisters in gay America's fight for freedom and respect.

Bombay journalist Narasimhan here offers an unnerving, carefully documented study of the Indian ritual whereby widows bring glory on themselves and their families by self-immolation on the pyres of their dead husbands. According to the author, the Hindi scriptures, which evolved from the second millennium B.C. to the second millennium A.D., sometimes suggest or sanction sati but this endorsement is equivocal. She further illustrates how, throughout Indian history, sati rituals must be seen as part of a wider canvas of social attitudes that denigrate women; a widow's life is particularly wretched and even today widows are routinely excluded from various religious functions and festivities. Although sati was officially outlawed in 1829, the rite persists: the book points to the 1987 self-immolation of 18-year-old Roop Kanwar in the presence of a crowd of 4,000, an act that incited nationwide pro- and anti-sati sentiment. Narasimhan demonstrates how the combination of a number of factors; lack of education, religious and economic compulsions and male chauvinism; help to explain how a culture rooted in the tenets of compassion and nonviolence can encourage the burning of its widows.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.