Rich and often moving oral history by participants in the gay- rights movement. Marcus (The Male Couple's Guide to Living Together, 1988—not reviewed) speaks to people from street hustlers to ministers, beginning with those who remember the early post-WW II era, when being homosexual was a crime or, at best, considered a mental disorder. The testimonies of Hal Call, Martin Block, ``Lisa Ben,'' Barbara Gittings, and other founders and early members of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis—both launched in the 1950's as social-outreach, quasi-political organizations- -demonstrate the real dangers and frustrations of being gay in America. There are numerous anecdotes of infighting and power struggles, but also of the police and FBI harassment that gave rise to the militancy of the Gay Liberation Front in the 1960's and 70's and, currently, of ACT UP. There are compelling reminiscences of ``coming out''; of often sleazy and dangerous gay ``clubs''; of political activism and the 1969 Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village, which galvanized gays across the country; of the antigay backlash of the 1980's and 90's; of tragic losses from suicide and AIDS. But Marcus also records stories of empowerment and triumph, such as the 1973 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, and the appointment by then-governor Jerry Brown of gay attorney Herbert Donaldson to a California judgeship. At times shocking, but often enlightening and inspiring: oral history at its most potent and rewarding. (Twenty-five pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016708-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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