A well-documented, important study of one facet of a complex artist.
Dramaturg, academic and journalist Paller situates Tennessee Williams within the New York gay theater of the mid-40s through 70s in a thoughtful, articulate defense of the playwright’s work.
By no means is Paller’s study an adequate biography of Williams: He quotes freely from Lyle Leverich’s Tom (1995) for a comprehensive look at the life. Instead, Paller concentrates on how the playwright’s work, especially its treatment of homosexuality (and evasion thereof), formed and fit into New York theater—excluding A Streetcar Named Desire, by the way, curiously ignored by Paller for “space limitation,” and also because, some may argue, “there are no gay characters in it, anyway.” Paller accepts the evidence of Williams’s “self-loathing” only in terms of the savage condemnation of homosexuality that permeated the society—Southern, WWII—he grew up in. In most of Williams’s best work, from Lord Byron’s Love Letter to The Night of the Iguana (1961), he would wrestle with “his urge to conceal with the equally strong need to reveal.” Paller tracks Williams’s work on Broadway, where he showcased almost exclusively, starting from the 1945 production of The Glass Menagerie. He examines each play with a probing analysis of plot, character and author’s intention. While mining Williams’s internal acceptance of his homosexuality (allowing, however, few clues from his actual life), Paller delves most effectively into the forms of institutionalized homophobia generated at the time of the Cold War, as in the Army’s justification for the rejection of homosexuals; the backlash to the Kinsey Report of 1948; the de facto criminalization of homosexuality, and the classification of homosexuality by the increasingly influential psychoanalytic establishment as a sickness. Moreover, Paller demonstrates a goodly knowledge of the entire context of New York theater. Yet his work will suffice only for readers already well familiar with Williams’s bittersweet trajectory as “founding father of the uncloseted gay world.”
A well-documented, important study of one facet of a complex artist.Pub Date: April 16, 2005
ISBN: 1-4039-6775-X
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.
A thoroughly documented scholarly treatise on Brazilian history.
In the first of two volumes spanning 500 years of Brazilian history, Hufferd focuses on the first 300 years of colonization in the northeast region. Portugal was seeking to build maritime trade to compete successfully with archrival Spain and to retain its national identity. The colony expanded westward from a number of large tracts of lands called captaincies, granted by Portuguese monarchs to wealthy royal favorites in return for profits gained through trade, breeding cattle and other ventures. These captaincies eventually gained the status of states, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mato Grasso, Manaus and Amazonia. Over subsequent decades, enterprising adventurers and explorers from these captaincies ventured inland, establishing sugar mills, cultivating grazing land and extracting gold, silver and precious gems. All ventures were highly labor-intensive, requiring massive amounts of manpower driven by slaves from Africa and native tribes. In the second volume, Hufferd focuses on the final 200 years of Brazil's rapid industrialization. After the Portuguese monarchy was forced to relocate its base from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, it became the fulcrum of a delicate political system within the new country. The social and political structure favored privileged hereditary landowners, even after the last reigning Emperor Pedro II was deposed amidst strong republican sentiment. Continuing the narrative through 2000, Hufferd chronicles upheavals most often caused by the chronic underdevelopment of existing resources, as the landowners maintained authority over the land, to the detriment of the black, mulatto and tribal segments of Brazilian society, who remained disenfranchised until recent years. In each volume, the author illustrates his vast knowledge of the topic, and he weaves political, economic, social and biographical threads throughout the panoramic narrative. While the expansive footnotes demonstrate impeccable research, they eventually hinder the narrative flow, requiring endless paging back and forth–the dissertation-style format ultimately detracts from the book's impact.
Problematic structure aside, a comprehensive history of Latin America's largest country.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2006
ISBN: 1-4208-0278-X, Vol.
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At 91, Spock (Dr. Spock on Parenting, 1988, etc.) offers his twilight thoughts on American society—and they're not happy ones. Although Spock's jabs come from the political left, his diagnosis is not unlike that of social conservatives like William Bennett. Among his points: The unraveling of family cohesiveness is a major cause of the country's social ills; there is a ``progressive coarsening of the society's attitude toward love and sexuality, which is further cheapened and exploited by television, films and popular music.'' But Spock also argues for better day-care facilities so that single motherhood needn't sentence both parent and child to poverty. He also discusses racial and gender discrimination. At heart, the old doctor is battling against a bottom-line, instrumental valuation of human life, an obsession with material riches rather than an appreciation of emotional richness.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-882605-12-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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