A brilliantly illustrated tarot guide for the LGBTQ+ history lover.
Barber and Callaghan combine divination with LGBTQ+ history in this new tarot guide.
Tarot is more popular than ever before, as are themed novelty decks that reimagine the arcana as everything from Jungian archetypes to the cast of Star Trek. The authors make their contribution to the genre with this deck, which winks at the special place tarot has within the LGBTQ+ community while providing the querent with “moments to remember, moments of triumph, moments of reflection, but ultimately a celebration of those to be proud of, those who let the world know their truth, and who will never be forgotten because of it.” Beginning chronologically with pioneering 19th-century gay activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (the Ace of Swords) and sticking to subsequent figures who have since died, Barber and Callaghan assemble a pantheon of movers, shakers, and thinkers who have contributed in some way to modern queer culture. The reader will find many of the expected icons, including Harvey Milk as the Star (“hope shining through the darkness”), James Baldwin as Judgment (“coming to terms with the past in order to move forward”), Freddie Mercury as the Six of Wands (“the bridge between strength and love”), and Audre Lorde as the Queen of Swords (“extreme individualism and radical new ideas”). There are more obscure figures as well, and some cards are represented by groups or movements (the Stonewall rioters for Fortune, activist group ACT UP for Death). The authors express their desire not to “sugar-coat certain cards that, to us, are objectively, dispassionately, negative in their meaning,” and for this reason, the deck features a few “malicious, malignant, and unquestionably vile” figures, like prosecutor Roy Cohn (the Devil) and serial killer Aileen Wuornos (Ten of Swords). Each entry is accompanied by a page explaining both the meaning of card and the why the authors selected that specific figure to represent it.
The real star of the book may be Wischerath, whose full-color illustrations nod cleverly at the famous Rider-Waite Tarot images of Pamela Colman Smith while rendering their subjects in deep, velvety tones. Wischerath’s depictions of Walt Whitman (the Empress, enthroned on a cushioned bench with his arm draped around a pelican) and Alan Turing (the Hanged Man, suspended above a pool with nerve-like neon trees behind him) are especially striking. The initial delight of the book is flipping through the pages and discovering a number of famous personages whom the reader may not have known were queer (like Greta Garbo, Ma Rainey, and John Maynard Keynes). A secondary pleasure is learning about figures the reader has likely never heard of at all, like We’wha, the 19th-century Zuni craftswoman and two-spirit (or lhamana) who served as a cultural ambassador between her people and the white settlers of New Mexico. Whether readers are interested in conducting a proper reading (which the introduction explains how to complete) or are simply seeking a unique art book to adorn a coffee table, this tarot guide will provide hours of educational, queer-inspired illumination.
A brilliantly illustrated tarot guide for the LGBTQ+ history lover.Pub Date: July 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798218466770
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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