Frank’s strikingly detailed, essential reportage reminds readers of the gay community’s enduring fight for equality.
A diligent archive of gay marriage equality from its roots as a hopeful pipe dream to its realization as a civil right.
Frank (Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, 2009), a journalist and director of the What We Know Project at Columbia Law School, retraces the history of and battle for same-sex marriage as a timeless “quest by LGBTQ people to take themselves and their love seriously.” He begins in the 1950s and early ’60s, when, even amid a general fear of homosexual exposure, a gay magazine pushed boundaries with a cover story advocating the social acceptance and normalization of “homophile marriage.” Just a few years before the Stonewall uprising, the article energized interest in a civil rights movement that would accelerate into the coming decades as tolerance and equality became paramount issues within gay and lesbian subcultures. Frank’s attention to historic detail is comprehensive and impressive, as is his ability to breezily recapture the trials of marriage equality and weave them into the general narrative of American LGBTQ history. With verve and a crisp, authoritative tone, the author sweeps readers through a history of civil rights campaigning in the 1970s, domestic partnership ordinances in the ’80s, and the story of how AIDS and protest movements produced an unshakeable solidarity. “If AIDS spurred greater familiarity, sympathy, and understanding of the gay community by the straight world,” writes the author, “it had an equally profound impact on gay people and activism.” Major steps forward were often set against backdrops of anti-gay ideologies, religious persecution, anti-sodomy laws, and the early criminalization of gay life. As decisive as the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act was when it became federal law, it was equally so when struck down after vigorous opposition in 2013. These pivotal events were championed by such tireless crusaders as Harvey Milk, attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Mary Bonauto, and political activist Andrew Sullivan, all of whom the author references respectfully.
Frank’s strikingly detailed, essential reportage reminds readers of the gay community’s enduring fight for equality.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-73722-8
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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