A journey into the lesbian archives makes a modern declaration of love to queer folks throughout time.
Bringing the often-hidden history of lesbians into the open.
“The serious hurdle about trying to figure out who you are—or even just who you fancy—is that you only have yourself to go on,” writes Lovatt of her challenges questioning her sexuality in her late 20s. She had dated men, but never been in love. She felt attracted to women, but did she want to be them or be with them? How to parse through these questions? Well, in the late 20th century, a phone service known as the “Lesbian Line” existed. Founded in the 1970s and thriving into the early internet era, this line and others like it emerged in Britain to deal with questions like these. The volunteers handled everything from young girls kicked out of their parents’ homes to women in heterosexual marriages suspecting they might be in love with their best friends. Lovatt builds a chosen family from this archive, sorting through decades of phone logs to report their stories. Due to repression, much of lesbian history is hidden history, and Lovatt writes that she felt like “an amateur lesbian sleuth” uncovering the queer past. Interspersed is Lovatt’s own coming out journey, plus research on lesbian pop culture in the time of the phone lines. Though the book is at times disappointingly introductory, scraping the surface of intersectionality without adding new depth, it strives to be as inclusive as possible in all definitions of “lesbian.” Summarizing the still-poignant ideas of key thinkers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks as well as a wlw—women loving women—TikTok feed, it covers a lot of ground. Even if some readers may wish for more radical thought or thorough research, the book nonetheless does admirable work for lesbian history and will nourish many young lesbians as well as those seeking to learn more about the community.
A journey into the lesbian archives makes a modern declaration of love to queer folks throughout time.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774496
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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