A richly detailed genealogy of the continuing battle for artistic freedom in the U.S.
An absorbing autopsy of America’s first culture wars.
Theater historian Butler (The Method, 2022) recasts the battles for artistic freedom of speech fought in the late-20th century, “the World War I of American arts and letters,” as a sobering prelude to today’s gloves-off assault on the arts. Starting in Kanawha County, West Virginia, with anti-sex crusader Alice Moore’s push to suppress liberal school textbooks, the author unfolds a depressing panorama of attempted censorship. Concerns about obscenity helped the indignant impresarios of the self-described “New Right”—from the American Family Association’s Donald Wildmon to Moral Majority hardliner Jesse Helms to National Review editor William F. Buckley—imagine a common enemy. And that enemy had a government office, the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), and a face or, rather, several faces: Andres Serrano, the creator of Piss Christ; the iconoclastic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; the performance artists known as the “NEA Four.” The legal wrangling between the holier-than-thou opponents of controversial art and its stalwart defenders makes for exasperating reading. But from the miasma of manufactured outrage also arose some unlikely heroes, such as the conservative lawyer John Frohnmayer, chairman of the NEA, and Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. If the former sought to save the NEA through artful compromise, Barrie ensured that “A Perfect Moment,” the posthumous Mapplethorpe exhibit canceled by the director of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., could be viewed in Cincinnati. Calling himself an “opinionated guide,” Butler frames his narrative as a drama in two acts. But the most abiding impression gained from this book is that of a dispiriting sameness: the endlessly rehashed argument that the American people needed saving from indecency. Ironically, as Butler shows, the thing that the religious right loves to hate—transgressive art—has also enabled them. Lacerated and diminished, the NEA survived the first culture wars. Whether what’s left of it today will outlast President Trump’s second administration is anyone’s guess.
A richly detailed genealogy of the continuing battle for artistic freedom in the U.S.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9781639733491
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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