Sprinkle says this book is a call to action, and especially a call for community unification, but I'm not sure this is exactly how he wants it to be done, nor does it necessarily address the same questions that a lot of queer community folks have been grappling with for a while now.

I want to say right here that this book is extremely graphic. There are descriptions of the hate crimes (all of which are murders, in this case; Sprinkle makes no claims as to why he chooses to focus on that, except probably because they have the most rhetorical power? which is a whole other thing,) and those descriptions can be incredibly, incredibly graphic; I was definitely triggered while reading the book more than once. Please, if you feel compelled to read this, take care of yourself while you do so.

There are also few questions about what it means to address these crimes in a larger sense. In the wake of Tyler Clementi's death, there was a lot of grappling with what it meant to think about imprisonment, framing certain actors in certain ways, and calls for death sentences. Sprinkle is not interested in those questions at all--perhaps this reflects the requests/wishes/desires of the surviving family members, who I will say he does due diligence by. He is careful and tender in his reporting of familial (biological or otherwise) relationships. But for a book making a political claim, and which is attentive to differences in race, gender, and class of victims, it is not attentive to larger questions about imprisonment. At times, it comes across as somewhat bloodthirsty, which is an odd take.

If I were to teach this (which I wouldn't,) I would pair it with Sarah Lamble's piece on Transgender Day of Remembrance. It does good journalistic work of structuring these people's lives, but there's very little heavy lifting and the parts where he justifies his reenactment of violence fall flat for me. ( )

This book represents a huge amount of painstaking research on the lives of some ordinary gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people who were murdered simply because someone didn't like who they were. Unfortunately, that research would need a much better writer to turn it into a readable book. Aside from being smug, self-righteous and sectarian, Sprinkle also takes the g/l/b/t community to task for failing to find a way to honor its dead. Hunh??? I don't know when or where he joined the community but, among other activities, we've produced a "quilt" honoring the AIDS dead which is now too large to be displayed in the Washington mall. Lately there have been extensive efforts not only to call attention to g/l/b/t suicides, but to actively do something to try to stop them. Also my community has an annual service commemorating transpeople who have been murdered in the previous year. This is not a community that ignores its dead!

In addition, Sprinkles's attempts to be inclusive are often clumsy and heavy handed. In an attempt to bring non-Christian religions into the book, Sprinkle introduces a Hindu god into his story of a Sikh killed by Orthodox Jews. It's so badly written that he appears to be blaming the Hindu god for the murder rather than the people who actually did the killing (not to mention their god).

This is an appalling book that should be ignored unless you want to mine the biographical research for another project. ( )