An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution.
Exploring how food has helped define the act of queer survival across decades of sexual prohibition.
Sectioned into four chronological parts, Birdsall, a celebrated culture and food writer, explores how the art of gastronomy became integrated into queer culture despite the prevalence of a closeted 20th-century “homosexual underground.” His narrative first probes the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when same-gender desire was considered a pathology and restaurants like San Francisco’s Paper Doll provided a safer haven for gender-challenging individuals. This was also true at the marble tables of Café Nicholson in Manhattan, which emerged as one of several queer-friendly “spaces with a dynamic mix of art and performance…where people’s masks could slip.” As the book meanders into the “audacious tang” of mid-1980s queer liberation, Birdsall expansively cites influential queer pioneers and disruptors like Harry Baker, inventor of the chiffon cake in 1927; Café Nicholson’s renowned chef Edna Lewis; James Baldwin; and Truman Capote, among others. Birdsall emphasizes relevant volumes like The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, scouring it for cloaked queer meaning, as well as 1940s food editor Genevieve Callahan’s lesbian-coded The California Cook Book, since, at the time, the publishing industry imperative was to “scrub manifestly queer voices from cookbooks.” Through an enthusiastic narrative, Birdsall names names and cites legacies of those responsible for ushering forward the evolution of queer food despite “a system determined to deny, prosecute, marginalize queer existence.” Naturally, Birdsall’s toothsome, astute four-course queer culinary history lesson begins and ends with cake.
An informative and expert analysis of the culture of food fueling a queer revolution.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324073796
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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