Like a milliner weeding wilted grapes and overripe bananas from Carmen Miranda’s fruit-basket hat, Green brushes aside outworn cultural assumptions about Brazil’s queer life to display its full glory, as well as the troubles which homophobia has sent its way. Exposing both the freedoms and limitations of Carnival for Brazilian queer life, Green (History/California State Univ., Long Branch) shows how the dizzying liberty of the festival scene masks a pervasive cultural rigidity. He argues that social codes, including those which characterize the active sexual partner in a homosexual relationship as the “real man” and the passive one as the “fairy,” structure both gay culture and the paragons of “normalcy” who deride it, and unearths the link between homophobia and racism, showing how Brazil’s racial politics and defense of the racial norm of whiteness created fantasies of an pure and ideal citizenry which could be maintained only through a rigorous program of social conformity. The historical sweep of Green’s analysis—from the parks of Rio de Janeiro at the turn of the 20th century to the Brazilian gay rights movement in the 1970s, from the nightlife of Sa— Paolo in the years before WWII to the Miss Brazil beauty pageant—illuminate Brazilian queer life with snapshot clarity. Stories of individuals are linked within a broad historical framework of governmental and social organizations, fleshing out the institutional with the personal. Green’s survey climaxes with the queer takeover of Carnival, an occasion on which gay Brazilians first revel in the liberating release of the season and then take advantage of its freedoms for quotidian comforts throughout the year. This latest gem in Chicago’s “Worlds of Desire” series offers a shimmering view of queer Brazilian life throughout the 20th century. (24 halftones, 10 line drawings, 6 maps)
Pub Date: Dec. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-30638-0
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
