An ambitious but overreaching treatise.
A journalist’s manifesto on how homosexuality has been a titanic force for human progress.
Benton, the gay founder of the Falls Church News-Press newspaper in Virginia, contends that being gay is not only a sexual orientation, but also a unique sensibility comprised of “heightened empathy and compassion,” an “alternative sensual perspective,” and “constructive nonconformity.” This mindset has a cosmic significance, he suggests, arguing that it’s “built into the very fabric of the unfolding of the universe” in order to advance “the pursuit of beauty, justice, knowledge and truth.” In particular, he says, he says that homosexuality had a profound influence on the American Revolution, and on the nation’s development under politicians who had gay sensibilities, such as Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. However, the post-Stonewall gay lifestyle has been blighted, Benton asserts, by its “descent into a wanton, unbridled, obsessive drug induced unending orgy of impersonal and extreme sex,” which he blames on “anarcho-hedonist counterculture values” implanted as part of a CIA conspiracy. Benton writes in ardent, sometimes-fulsome prose (“Such a noble and heroic breed are homosexuals!”), subsuming everything virtuous under his book’s umbrella (“virtue,” he says, is “the invention of homosexuals”); he also discusses numerous other well-known figures, from William Shakespeare to Jesus Christ. It’s a wide-ranging and sometimes-stimulating thesis that calls on everything from Greek mythology to subatomic physics, and Benton also provides illuminating appreciations of gay literary lions, such as Tennessee Williams and Larry Kramer. Historians and others, though, will take issue with many of Benton’s pronouncements, which often lack citations, and his penchant for stereotyping will strike many readers as crude and reductionist: “When a straight brute walks into a room, he orients immediately, in his constant urge to reproduce, to any attractive women there,” he writes. “When a gay person walks into the same room, he or she orients instead toward whether the drapes and the carpet match.”
An ambitious but overreaching treatise.Pub Date: May 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-890958-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: BCI Books
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.
That thing in the air that is deadlier than even your “strenuous flus”? Trump knew—and did nothing about it.
The big news from veteran reporter Woodward’s follow-up to Fear has been widely reported: Trump was fully aware at the beginning of 2020 that a pandemic loomed and chose to downplay it, causing an untold number of deaths and crippling the economy. His excuse that he didn’t want to cause a panic doesn’t fly given that he trades in fear and division. The underlying news, however, is that Trump participated in this book, unlike in the first, convinced by Lindsey Graham that Woodward would give him a fair shake. Seventeen interviews with the sitting president inform this book, as well as extensive digging that yields not so much news as confirmation: Trump has survived his ineptitude because the majority of Congressional Republicans go along with the madness because they “had made a political survival decision” to do so—and surrendered their party to him. The narrative often requires reading between the lines. Graham, though a byword for toadyism, often reins Trump in; Jared Kushner emerges as the real power in the West Wing, “highly competent but often shockingly misguided in his assessments”; Trump admires tyrants, longs for their unbridled power, resents the law and those who enforce it, and is quick to betray even his closest advisers; and, of course, Trump is beholden to Putin. Trump occasionally emerges as modestly self-aware, but throughout the narrative, he is in a rage. Though he participated, he said that he suspected this to be “a lousy book.” It’s not—though readers may wish Woodward had aired some of this information earlier, when more could have been done to stem the pandemic. When promoting Fear, the author was asked for his assessment of Trump. His reply: “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis.” Multiple crises later, Woodward concludes, as many observers have, “Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982131-73-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.
A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.
On Aug. 16, 1897, the steam whaler Belgica set off from Belgium with young Adrien de Gerlache as commandant. Thus begins Sancton’s riveting history of exploration, ingenuity, and survival. The commandant’s inexperienced, often unruly crew, half non-Belgian, included scientists, a rookie engineer, and first mate Roald Amundsen, who would later become a celebrated polar explorer. After loading a half ton of explosive tonite, the ship set sail with 23 crew members and two cats. In Rio de Janeiro, they were joined by Dr. Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. In Punta Arenas, four seamen were removed for insubordination, and rats snuck onboard. In Tierra del Fuego, the ship ran aground for a while. Sancton evokes a calm anxiety as he chronicles the ship’s journey south. On Jan. 19, 1898, near the South Shetland Islands, the crew spotted the first icebergs. Rough waves swept someone overboard. Days later, they saw Antarctica in the distance. Glory was “finally within reach.” The author describes the discovery and naming of new lands and the work of the scientists gathering specimens. The ship continued through a perilous, ice-littered sea, as the commandant was anxious to reach a record-setting latitude. On March 6, the Belgica became icebound. The crew did everything they could to prepare for a dark, below-freezing winter, but they were wracked with despair, suffering headaches, insomnia, dizziness, and later, madness—all vividly capture by Sancton. The sun returned on July 22, and by March 1899, they were able to escape the ice. With a cast of intriguing characters and drama galore, this history reads like fiction and will thrill fans of Endurance and In the Kingdom of Ice.
A rousing, suspenseful adventure tale.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984824-33-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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