An accessible, often insightful consideration of a misunderstood sexual identity.
An overview of bisexuality and the misconceptions surrounding it.
A London-based criminal psychologist and podcaster with an interest in gender studies, Shaw aims “to bring the colorful world of bisexual scholarship out of the shadows.” Her work blends assessments of contemporary research, anecdotes concerning famous bisexual individuals, and reflections on her own sexuality. Among the author’s primary targets are those who would dismiss bisexuality as a form of false consciousness, and she passionately advocates for a recognition of its legitimacy as a category of sexual identity—and more generally for an increased acceptance of fluidity in sexual orientation. In doing so, she draws parallels between the cultural reception of bi and trans identities and movingly describes how bisexuals have historically alarmed—and continue to provoke hostility from—both gay and straight communities. Shaw writes intriguingly about the idea that bisexuality represents “an original step in the evolution of [human] sexuality. Instead of it being unnatural, being behaviorally bisexual is commonplace in the animal kingdom, even in far less complex creatures than ourselves. It’s just humans who have conceived of non-heterosexual behavior as ‘crimes against nature.’ ” Also engaging are Shaw’s accounts of pioneering researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and Fritz Klein, whose work has helped gradually shift public attitudes. The author devotes considerable attention to long-standing and entrenched forms of prejudice, but she finds evidence, at least in the Western world, of progress in how bisexuals are finding ways to affirm their identity more freely. As she contends, “it is becoming harder for people not to see the beautiful world of attraction beyond gender.” The largely informal and always lively style of Shaw’s writing helps make her case. She is persuasive in her insistence that bisexuality is an important and overlooked dimension of the human story.
An accessible, often insightful consideration of a misunderstood sexual identity.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4435-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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