A groundbreaking work of cultural restoration.
Drawn to the land.
Hall, the author of several books on architecture and country houses, delivers an eye-opening account of how queer lives have both shaped and been shaped by the English landscape. Rather than treating Britain’s National Trust properties as static memorials to aristocratic lineage, Hall uncovers a deeper story: These houses, gardens, ruins, and woodlands often became empty spaces onto which queer people projected desire, identity, and reinvention. The Trust’s original vagueness—its mandate to protect “natural beauty” and “historic interest” without specifying why—becomes, in Hall’s telling, a liberating canvas onto which generations inscribed personal meanings, including queer ones. Drawing on his background as architectural editor of Country Life, the author moves with assurance through the Trust’s holdings, from the decayed grandeur of Knole, where Vita Sackville-West first learned the pain of exclusion, to the ruin she later refashioned at Sissinghurst, a masterpiece of queer self-invention. From the coded eroticism of William John Bankes’ correspondence with Lord Byron to Bankes’ transformation of Kingston Lacy while in exile for sodomy, Hall shows how queer desire shaped not just private lives but entire estates. Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, becomes another touchstone in this emotional geography, absorbing the sensibilities of gay writers such as Henry James and E.F. Benson, each layering new meanings onto its rooms and gardens. The book reaches its philosophical heart with E.M. Forster, whose bequest of Piney Copse embodies his belief in landscape as a place where erotic, ecological, and political freedoms converge. Like Willa Cather wandering Wenlock Edge in search of A.E. Housman’s England, Hall invites us to see the Trust’s holdings as queer topographies—sites of reinvention as vital as any official history.
A groundbreaking work of cultural restoration.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781781301142
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury Caravel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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