A refreshingly unorthodox examination of the sexual revolution that began in the US in the early 1960s. Bailey’s (American Studies/Univ. of New Mexico) argument proceeds from two main contentions: 1) the term —revolution— conflates many different impulses and outcomes and thus obscures the origins and effects of multiple shifting attitudes towards sexuality; 2) the preponderance of those changing attitudes did not arise on the urban fringe (Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury) and percolate across to the cultural mainstream; many of the important changes were actually forged in the heartland by everyday, small-town Americans going about the normal business of living their lives. Bailey employs Lawrence, Kans., as her representative site for the American heartland and traces how changes in attitudes concerning such disparate trends as official government policies toward sexually transmitted disease, the creation and dissemination of the birth-control pill, college administrators— efforts to control “panty raids” at the state university, and the rights of women and homosexuals all contributed to what could eventually be recognized as a “sexual revolution” on a national level. She pays particular attention to unintended consequences, such as the manner in which the deployment of the birth-control pill to stop the “population explosion” contributed to the liberation of heterosexual sexual relations, and how reform of the curfew system in the state universities led to greater opportunity for sexual relations among college students. Bailey reminds us of what was at stake in the sexual revolution for many of those caught up in it; she details the story of one young male student threatened with expulsion due to a report of homosexual activity, and a young woman branded a whore in newspapers across the country for living with her boyfriend. An extremely grounded look at an often controversial topic. (22 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-80278-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
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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