A knowledgeable, high-spirited tribute to queer music through the ages.
A comprehensive journey through the annals of LGBTQ+ music from the past four decades.
As a veteran music industry journalist and critic, Walters has dedicated the past four decades to documenting and preserving the history of the queer music scene. Here, he turns his vast expertise into an expansive retrospective of musical performers and the mark they made not only on their respective genres, but the impact and influence they continue to have on global queer communities. Despite industry decision-makers who, 57 years after Stonewall, “still find reasons to nix or marginalize undisguised queer content in most pop music,” Walters writes, there is certainly room for celebration, and he begins with a commemorative nod to the 1960s, when free-thinking artists like Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, Janis Joplin, Queen, Elton John, and David Bowie defined a decade particularly appealing to queer audiences for their wildly alternative artistry and defiant lyricism. Walters writes fondly about the bawdy songs of Bette Midler, who once entertained gay bathhouse crowds in the 1970s, the Motown era unifying racial and sexual minorities with soulful rhythms, and onward into the birth of the electrifying disco era that ignited queer nightlife dance floors across the globe to the sounds of Sylvester, ABBA, and a controversial Donna Summer. Walters also draws on interviews he has personally conducted with artists such as Luther Vandross, Dolly Parton, and K.D. Lang, and the results are consistently fascinating and revelatory. Though most artists are queer-identified or “adjacent,” there are several Walters mentions who are culturally allied with the LGBTQ+ movement and have made artistic contributions to the unity and equality of the queer community, among them Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Nirvana. Uplifting, endlessly entertaining, and informative, the anthology honors decades of influential music-makers, their craft, and “the community these nurturing songs give us—especially when we think we’re most alone.”
A knowledgeable, high-spirited tribute to queer music through the ages.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9798217059829
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
