A rangy and readable book, both personal and political, that doesn’t quite coalesce.
Portrait of a gay marriage.
In his award-winning previous book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (2021), the American-born author reflected on the watering holes where he and his English partner found sex and community (and sometimes banality) in the days before hookup apps like Grindr. His new book, a similar blend of memoir and sociopolitical history, widens the lens to examine how political debates over same-sex marriage affected the tenuous fate of this transnational couple, who ultimately tied the knot when it became legal to do so in the U.K. The author recounts their meeting in a London nightclub in 1996; that same week, he notes, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. “It wasn’t against the law for us to fall in love,” he writes. “But if we were to forge a commitment, there didn’t seem to be any place to take it.” For the next decade, the couple existed in limbo, first apart on different continents, then together in San Francisco. The author’s partner would eventually overstay his visa, ushering in another form of legal insecurity. “Our relationship, built on apartness—longing—had entered its phase of subterfuge—pretending,” Lin writes. As their personal story unfolds in a series of rented Bay Area apartments, the author serves up a potted history of the gay marriage debate in the ’90s and early 2000s alongside passages on matelotage, a contractual arrangement between two pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries; Clive Michael Boutilier, the gay Canadian deemed a “psychopathic personality” and denied U.S. citizenship in 1965; and the ill-starred relationship of artist Felix Gonzales-Torres and his Canadian lover, Ross Laycock, in the ’80s and ’90s. Lin’s prose is as striking as ever—the lyric descriptions of gay sex recall Edmund White at his randiest—but the accounts of D.C. politics and Supreme Court cases feel dutiful rather than illuminating.
A rangy and readable book, both personal and political, that doesn’t quite coalesce.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780316545792
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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