An urgent exploration of equality at a moment rife with fresh threats against queer communities.
A bracing journey through decades of struggle for queer equality.
In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated anti-sodomy laws, which had often been used to broadly discriminate against queer Americans. This landmark ruling, writes Phelps, a University of North Texas historian, helped queer Americans secure additional rights, including marriage rights, because “as long as their sexual relationships were outlawed, queer Americans wore a stigma of criminality, and the likelihood that a group viewed as serial lawbreakers might successfully assert their rights and gain equal treatment seemed implausible.” Movingly, the author rewinds and introduces readers to the everyday queer Texans and their allies who paved a path of small, vital steps to that momentous 2003 decision. For instance, in 1969, police arrested Alvin Buchanan for allegedly having sex in public bathrooms. Partnering with a married couple who said that they also engaged in outlawed sexual acts, Buchanan brought the first constitutional challenge to the Texas sodomy law. A federal district court deemed the law unconstitutional—because of how it affected the privacy of the couple, not Buchanan. Essentially, legislators merely designed a statute specifically targeting sexual behavior between people of the same sex. Despite the undesirable outcome, Buchanan v. Batchelor informed Baker v. Wade in 1979. While that case, too, was ultimately unsuccessful at overturning the state sodomy law, it “nevertheless helped establish the necessary groundwork for the eventual victory in the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas and was a significant development in the longer struggle for queer equality.” Marshaling a variety of sources—legal records, queer publications, interviews—Phelps creates a vivid narrative that shows how Lawrence didn’t spring out of the blue. It was one part of a daisy chain of heroic queer organizing efforts.
An urgent exploration of equality at a moment rife with fresh threats against queer communities.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781477322321
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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