A lucid, rightfully indignant study that demands a renewed commitment to equality for all.
Thoroughgoing history of a signal injustice committed against gay Americans by the American judiciary.
Many readers will never have heard of Michael Hardwick, but his is a story that all should know. In 1982, an Atlanta police officer intending to serve a warrant on an out gay bartender for drinking in public found the man in flagrante with another man, which “violated Georgia’s centuries-old sodomy law and carried a potential twenty-year prison sentence.” Arrested, Hardwick spent the next four years fighting for his freedom, until, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia indeed “had the right to patrol its citizens’ sex lives.” Pressing his fight, Hardwick, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, was far from alone. As historian and journalist Padgett notes, police in cities such as Miami “surveilled gay hot spots in the hopes of catching queer people in the act,” complete with hidden cameras. Against precedents such as a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that asserted the right to privacy of interracial couples and another that barred states from interfering with the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, the Reagan-era Supreme Court accepted the prosecution’s argument that “sodomy had never been included in the ‘zone of privacy’ normally accorded inside the home.” Despite a brilliant defense mounted by the noted constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe, in a 5-4 ruling, the court effectively declared gay people to be second-class citizens with limited civil rights. Fortunately for Hardwick, the statute of limitations ran out, but he was dead well before the Bowers v. Hardwick decision was overturned in a 6-3 ruling (opposed by William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas). Padgett closes this detailed account of the Hardwick case by noting that the rights of gay Americans are again imperiled by a strongly conservative court.
A lucid, rightfully indignant study that demands a renewed commitment to equality for all.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324035411
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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