Throughout the memoir, it’s hard not to fall in love with Burks for her big-heartedness and enduring sense of humor in the face of suffering. However, All the Young Men isn’t an uplifting book. Ignorance, denial and cruelty have always been, and always will be, killers. But as Burks forges a path alongside these vulnerable men, her embrace of education and rejection of bigotry light the way forward for us all.
It’s a tale of high drama and mesmerising detail, but also of breathtaking courage and compassion ... The cause is education, combating prejudice and hate, but most of all the cause is love. It’s the love Burks didn’t get from her family or husband. The love she lavishes on these men is deeply moving, and she gets some back. At a gay club she meets a community of drag queens who are like a family. The star of them all, Billy, is the one she loves most ... The ghost writer Kevin Carr O’Leary has taken Burks’s stories and turned them into a beautiful book, catching her Southern sass and charm. The epilogue makes it clear that Ruth Coker Burks has not had the recognition or happiness she deserves.
Burks and her co-writer balance tragedy with bright moments of joy, sly humor and inspiring empathy in this surprisingly pleasurable memoir about bridging cultural divides to nurture one another as human beings ... As a child of the HIV-AIDS crisis, I carry trauma from those days. I’m also grateful to have witnessed true courage and compassion while growing up. That’s what All the Young Men offers anyone who reads it.
The origin story of the protagonist, dramatic on its own, is mentioned as an aside to the vignettes about the lives of the men she helps. It provides a powerful backstory. Her mother, a former nurse, was placed in a TB sanatorium when she was a child. She didn’t have TB but a rare lung disease. Medical misdiagnosis and mistreatment are part of the family history, and so too is caretaking. The first-person narrative offers the reader moments of shared epiphany ... The unflappable nature of her resilience against the shifting historical context is stunning to witness. Her co-writer, Kevin Carr O’Leary, helps shape this hero narrative well.Any drag queen worth her words will admire Coker Burks’s southern sass as an art form. The dialogue is cutting and exact ... All the Young Men could be categorised in many ways: it’s one woman’s relentless mission to help a community survive when those in power abandoned them. It’s the tale of people with Aids who returned to Arkansas during the first years of the epidemic. It’s also the story of a Christian woman who would go on to advise the Clinton administration on Aids education.
A a young woman finds a significant role for herself as an advocate for AIDS patients, based largely on her strong character and refusal to be defined by societal norms ... created with the assistance of bestselling writer Kevin Carr O’Leary, has brought her charitable actions to light, and that in turn has helped not only her but also the LGBTQ community at large. Her assertive willingness to offer simple, human kindness that others in her community could not be bothered to spare should now make her a heroine in the eyes of many, even those who once looked down on her for her efforts.
This is a powerful memoir, cowritten with author O’Leary, about personal responsibility and the too easily forgotten beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Burks’s spirited, straightforward prose balances the heartbreak of her story with just enough humor and toughness ... A must-read for anyone interested in narratives of front-line responses to the early AIDS crisis as well as personal accounts of kindness and determination.
Though too much backstory and detail sometimes slow the narrative pace, Burks’ vivid memories of 'my guys' and the trials she endured fighting against prejudice offer a portrait of courageous compassion that is both rare and inspiring ... An overlong but deeply moving, meaningful book.
... plainspoken ... Anecdotes of small-town gay bars and drag queen rivalries add levity to tales of hardship and sacrifice—crosses set ablaze on her lawn, her young daughter ostracized at school. When AIDS advocacy turned into a big-money business, she writes, she was left out, and advances in medicine rendered her role 'obsolete.' This worthy account offers as much bitter as sweet.
