Though occasionally rambling or repetitious, this fulfilling collection will certainly edify, enlighten and entertain.
A distinguished, prolific journalist collects two years of published essays on the homosexual movement and its historic legacy.
Benton’s long-running article series “The Gay Science Papers” appeared online and in print in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., media from October 2010 to September 2012, two years that proved particularly pivotal for the gay community. The book is meant to be both a supplement to the Falls Church News-Press global affairs column he’d been penning since 1997 and a truer translation of the term “gay,” as opposed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the term in his 1882 tome The Gay Science—of which Benton is “not a fan.” The outspoken author believes his writings collectively galvanize “a new dialogue on shaping LGBT identity and self-esteem going forward into a new world of equality.” Readers will come away with much the same sentiment. Throughout the text, Benton weaves in his own personal history as an early gay liberation advocate, and his highly intellectual, pioneering nature is evident from the opening sections, where he challenges preconceived assumptions of gay culture as an entity comprised solely of “radical hedonistic dominance.” The essays paint a wonderfully multifaceted portrait of the gay community, incorporating unique concepts like “gay sensibility” and “sensual perspective” into a dialogue that becomes more adventurous as the collection progresses. Some of the more moving pieces find Benton intelligently assessing the genesis of the LGBTQ population through conversations between Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs, or opining about how AIDS has reshaped both homo- and heterosexual cultures, and what the future holds for equal rights and marriage privileges for the LGBTQ community. Benton bolsters his ideology with liberal references to many influential, trailblazing gay writers and entertainers like Larry Kramer, Andrew Holleran, Walt Whitman and Randy Shilts—not to mention contemporary role models like Ricky Martin and Johnny Weir. His opinions on the paradigm of the homosexual “closet,” the Stonewall riots, and the devastation wrought by AIDS and hate crimes are insightful and valid, reiterating how significantly those topics have contributed to the richly diversified cultural fabric of gay history in America.
Though occasionally rambling or repetitious, this fulfilling collection will certainly edify, enlighten and entertain.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59021-392-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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