History at its best: informative, insightful, at times downright titillating.
Sure, Walt Whitman was a big queen, but Abraham Lincoln?
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Drawing on contemporary accounts of love, affection, and sex between men in 19th-century America, Katz (The Invention of Heterosexuality, 1995, etc.) teases out a history of sexuality in an era determined to veil it. He begins with a portrait of the intense friendship between Lincoln and Joshua Fry Speed, who avowed that “no two men were ever more intimate.” Katz is careful to place such comments precisely within their sociocultural context; along with many other sexual historians, he believes that the words “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” represent recent attempts to construct human sexuality into polarized and opposite extremes. By denaturalizing such a construct and pointing out its problems, Katz elucidates the shifting dynamics of bedroom behavior. The stories here, culled from diaries, journals, newspaper articles, court cases, and other documents, create a living tableau of 19th-century male sex in America. Whitman looms large, taking several lovers and thus several chapters. History’s unknowns, however, provide some of the most illuminating material; the stories of men such as Albert Dodd, William Davis, John Stafford Fiske, and Peter Sevanley must be told if we are to understand the shifting realities of sexuality from generation to generation. The photographs and illustrations— female impersonators, men wrestling, a bathhouse brochure—allow readers to witness the complex but often blatant coding of non-normative sexuality. Although most of Katz’s material concerns personal relationships between men, we do get glimpses into a communal queer culture as well through stories of such institutions as Frank Stevenson’s bar, the Slide, lasciviously dubbed by the New York Press as the “The Wickedest Place in New York.”
History at its best: informative, insightful, at times downright titillating.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-226-42615-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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
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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