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DIRTY WORKS

OBSCENITY ON TRIAL IN AMERICA’S FIRST SEXUAL REVOLUTION

An important book about a neglected figure in the fight for reproductive rights and freedom of expression.

The history of a spirited crusade against outdated censorship laws.

As cultural historian Gary demonstrates in this exhaustively researched book, the Roaring ’20s introduced “a culture increasingly marked by leisure and consumption” that moral custodians feared “would uncouple sex from the idea of sin.” The author describes the efforts of ACLU co-founder and lawyer Morris Ernst, who, from the 1920s to the ’50s, fought decades-old obscenity laws with colleagues Alexander Lindey and Harriet Pilpel in support of feminists, birth control activists, and others. Gary expertly details the forces Ernst battled, including the 1873 Comstock Act, named after Anthony Comstock, “the nation’s foremost censor and smut eradicator”; the subsequent efforts of his protégé, John Sumner; and the Postal and Customs officials who carried out their remit. The author then describes Ernst’s biggest cases, featuring such clients as Mary Ware Dennett, indicted for obscenity over her pamphlet The Sex Side of Life (1918); Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness (1928), “the most important English-language lesbian novel” of its time; and Margaret Sanger, after New York City police officers raided her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. Gary also describes the firm’s work defending sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and the U.S. publication of Ulysses before Ernst’s late-life “truculent anticommunism” and his “dubious alliance” with J. Edgar Hoover. The long sections on legal arguments are dry, but the narrative contains memorable passages. Among them is Ernst’s cross-examination of a doctor who unwittingly became a witness for the defense when he admitted that contraceptive devices could be used for other medical purposes. Gary quotes lines from censorship advocates that read as risible, as when a U.S. Attorney warned that Dennett’s pamphlet “would lead to sexual depravity in the streets” and “invoked ancient Roman practices as a useful model for thinking about a daughter’s maiden chastity,” comments that “produced plenty of smirks among Dennett’s supporters.”

An important book about a neglected figure in the fight for reproductive rights and freedom of expression.

Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5036-2759-8

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Stanford Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Readers Vote
  • 62


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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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