Not without flaws, but an illuminating, worthy addition to the scholarship.
A compendium of primary sources on the historic uprising for LGBTQ liberation.
The Stonewall riots of 1969 are infamous, not only for their electrifying impact on the American LGBTQ movement, but also for their long-contested memory: “who can, who does, and who should lay claim to them”? Using more than 200 documents, editor Stein (History/San Francisco State Univ.; Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 2012, etc.) contextualizes the New York City rebellion of transgender and gay bar patrons against a homophobic police raid. Framed in three subdivided parts, each section contains extended excerpts of newspaper articles, fliers, court decisions, and other accounts. Together, they create a mosaic of the cultural and political realities before, during, and after the riots. The editor helpfully provides source descriptions of each section—e.g., “published originally in homophile magazines”—as well as a perceptive introduction that encourages readers to “think carefully and critically about my editorial work.” Significantly, Stein acknowledges that many of his media sources offer “limited discussion” of African-American LGBTQ experiences in their reporting, and he notes that gay rights activists were deeply indebted to black liberation movements. For example, LGBTQ people employed the “direct action tactics” of African-American organizers, “including demonstrations, sit-ins, and riots,” and popular pre-Stonewall slogans “were adaptations or appropriations of ‘Black is Beautiful’ and ‘Black Power.’ ” Stein is less successful in his interpretation of transgender history. For example, when examining police records from the first night of the Stonewall riots, Stein determines that one woman and five men were arrested, “judging by the names.” For many trans people, legal names do not provide meaningful clues to gender. On the whole, the book reflects both the brilliance and contradictions of a multifaceted history. Though people of color are notably minimized in historical records, Stein’s reflective curation is an important contribution to understanding what Stonewall was and what it represents. History students are most likely to enjoy this volume, which is arranged like a primary source textbook.
Not without flaws, but an illuminating, worthy addition to the scholarship.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4798-1685-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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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