A superfluous survey of gay men's approaches to sexual behavior over the past 50 years. Sadownick (Sacred Lips of the Bronx, 1994) has combed the archives of modern gay history in search of specific accounts of sexual liaisons and examples of the shifting mindsets of successive generations of gay men. Beginning with ex-GIs' memoirs of WW II barracks assignations, he relates anecdotes of furtive, fearful cruising in YMCAs, parks, and public toilets during the postwar years, when perpetual threats of police entrapment and arrest kept nearly all gay men closeted. Having established quickly that gay sex in the '50s and '60s was a generally shadowy business, Sadownick fills in the pre-Stonewall period with alternately pointless and overfamiliar anecdotes about the early gay-rights activists, Allen Ginsberg's poetry, and contemporary psychological theories of sexuality. With the arrival of the modern era of gay liberation in 1969, the narrative picks up libidinous steam, quoting amply from journals, memoirs, and fictional accounts of anonymous sex in bathhouses and sex clubs. While these quotes demonstrate conclusively that gay men in the '70s were exceedingly promiscuous and staggeringly audacious in their pursuit of new sexual thrills, the point has hardly been in question. The era's excesses led to burnout among many men even before AIDS curtailed promiscuity, and for most of the '80s grief, confusion, and condoms quelled the exuberance of the sexual revolution. But the past several years have witnessed an unsettling tendency to defy AIDS through unsafe sex and drug use. When explaining such trends, Sadownick lets loose annoyingly facile bolts of analysis that cry out for clarification: ``Oppressed or not, many homosexual men lusted after men who symbolized the `masculine archetype' as it filtered through their feelings for their fathers.'' And since Sadownick generally considers only the most clichÇd gay lives in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, this sexual history is far from definitive. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-251268-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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