A welcome makeover for the textbook view of New York—and American—cultural history.
A brilliant account of the evolution of modern gay culture in post-WWII New York.
Not that such things can be pinpointed with any precision. “Queer Street,” as McCourt (Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, 2002, etc.) calls it, is really a state of mind: “It doesn’t start anywhere; there isn’t a beginning.” Yet a story has to begin somewhere, and McCourt locates his at about the time that armies of war-weary, liberated combat veterans returned home and decided to live on their own terms. Beyond Manhattan, the rest of the country wasn’t quite ready for the gay veterans “and their undecorated coevals,” McCourt adds: “Viewed by the world of straight America (primed to rescind the liberty and license vouchsafed queers under grueling combat conditions), [Queer Street] becomes the radical inverse of the renewed moral and civic duty prescribed in the triumphalist Republic.” If that snippet has your head spinning, it is typical of McCourt’s exuberant, elliptical style, which sometimes begs a Derrida to serve as translator. Blending personal and cultural history, McCourt takes a leisurely stroll along that long avenue, examining attitudes pro and con vis-à-vis the gay demimonde in a narrative that touches, dizzyingly, on the French martyr Simone Weil, Counter-Reformation Jesuitism, J. Edgar Hoover, Kaye Ballard, Broadway (when, in the 1950s, the “sensitive boy” à la Anthony Perkins, Roddy MacDowell, and Dean Stockwell emerged as an ideal), Method acting, Fire Island, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stonewall, and Bette Davis. This is magpie history, highly selective and full of shiny objects, but it is remarkably coherent for all its strange turns; McCourt’s notes on camp (which locates “the success in certain passionate failures”) are worth the price of admission alone. So is McCourt’s sharp reminder that not the larger culture, not recruitment, not seminary “makes any boy gay . . . the job is done by the parents in the first two to four years of life, the end.”
A welcome makeover for the textbook view of New York—and American—cultural history.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05051-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
