Scholarly, yet also bright and bawdy. (16 pages of some astonishing b&w illustrations)
An eye-opening, readable survey of changing attitudes toward sex and sexuality—and its regulation—from the mid-15th to the end of the 18th century.
Naphy (School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy/Univ. of Aberdeen, UK; Born to be Gay: A History of Homosexuality, not reviewed) divides forbidden sex acts into the illegal and the unnatural, putting into the first category acts with the potential for procreation (fornication by the unmarried, adultery, bigamy, rape, violent sexual assault, prostitution) and into the second nonprocreative acts (homosexuality, sadism, child abuse, bestiality, sex with demons). Historically, ensuring paternity—and inheritance and family honor—was essential, and therefore so was controlling female sexuality, and to that end came about the promotion of premarital chastity and sanctions against sex outside of marriage. Naphy has scoured court records, finding scores of cases illustrating the different ways courts in different times and places regarded specific behaviors, the means they used to obtain information, the weight they gave to individual circumstances, and the sentences they imposed. A double standard was common: conviction of adultery might well mean death by drowning for a woman but a jail sentence or time in the stocks for a man. Especially absorbing are Naphy’s discussion of prostitution and the conflicting notions about its role in society; his examination of sexual deviance; and the shifts in attitudes toward homosexual behavior, both male and female. It is also interesting to see that earlier courts faced many of the same difficulties—protecting the rights of both parties, say—as today’s courts do when taking evidence in cases involving children. Readers may find the bestiality section the most bizarre, with cases involving sex with cows and horses and accounts of satanic rituals. What’s clear from Naphy’s report is that attitudes may shift about what’s right and what’s wrong, but sex in its many forms is here to stay.
Scholarly, yet also bright and bawdy. (16 pages of some astonishing b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7524-2977-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tempus/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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 Yorker staff 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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