A scholarly, immersive, and vital history of queer intolerance.
A university academic explores the origins of homophobia through Greek history.
As an evangelical Christian teenager, author Tanner recalls firmly believing his simmering queer yearnings would send him to hell. After a period of suicidal ideation, he admits that studying ancient Greek altered his opinions on the Bible and its “passed down” translations and interpretations. This epiphany not only reinforced his self-acceptance as a gay man, but launched a keen interest in discovering why Western culture believed so sternly that homosexuality was sinful. His debut examines queer poets (Theognis), prophets, politicians, philosophers, and various locales throughout the ancient world (Lesbos, Boeotia) to uncover how society came to adopt a vehement hatred of queer sex and queer life. The agitators, his research revealed, were economic discrepancies, political inequality and the masculine ideals adopted by victorious Greek soldiers, and the ancient versions of “mob-rule” democracy, where the rise to power of wealthy oppressors brought forth the demonization of same-sex desire. Despite Athenians who sought to capitalize on the meek and less fortunate, queer love thrived in classic couplings like Homer’s Achilles and Patroclus and in classic Greek theater performances. Eventually, homosexual desire and queer sex became derogatorily associated with a “depraved lack of self-control” and was considered a predatory, perverted act and a symbol of “extravagance and excess”; this attitude had lasting sociological effects on Greek populaces and expanded globally through religious means, among others. The author delivers this rich history with vibrant authority and fairmindedly reveals the overlooked legacies of queer women and transgender individuals despite the annals of Greece and Rome being dominated by often misogynistic male voices. If Tanner’s scrutiny becomes overly academic for the casual reader, the text brightens toward the concluding chapters, in which he shifts his timeline to examine how modern homophobia continues to demonize queer love. Countering incremental advancements in queer equality, he issues a concluding caution: “Just because we live in a moment of tolerance and acceptance now, it doesn’t mean we always will.”
A scholarly, immersive, and vital history of queer intolerance.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781399422291
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
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