Though occasionally rambling or repetitious, this fulfilling collection will certainly edify, enlighten and entertain.
A distinguished, prolific journalist collects two years of published essays on the homosexual movement and its historic legacy.
Benton’s long-running article series “The Gay Science Papers” appeared online and in print in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., media from October 2010 to September 2012, two years that proved particularly pivotal for the gay community. The book is meant to be both a supplement to the Falls Church News-Press global affairs column he’d been penning since 1997 and a truer translation of the term “gay,” as opposed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s use of the term in his 1882 tome The Gay Science—of which Benton is “not a fan.” The outspoken author believes his writings collectively galvanize “a new dialogue on shaping LGBT identity and self-esteem going forward into a new world of equality.” Readers will come away with much the same sentiment. Throughout the text, Benton weaves in his own personal history as an early gay liberation advocate, and his highly intellectual, pioneering nature is evident from the opening sections, where he challenges preconceived assumptions of gay culture as an entity comprised solely of “radical hedonistic dominance.” The essays paint a wonderfully multifaceted portrait of the gay community, incorporating unique concepts like “gay sensibility” and “sensual perspective” into a dialogue that becomes more adventurous as the collection progresses. Some of the more moving pieces find Benton intelligently assessing the genesis of the LGBTQ population through conversations between Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs, or opining about how AIDS has reshaped both homo- and heterosexual cultures, and what the future holds for equal rights and marriage privileges for the LGBTQ community. Benton bolsters his ideology with liberal references to many influential, trailblazing gay writers and entertainers like Larry Kramer, Andrew Holleran, Walt Whitman and Randy Shilts—not to mention contemporary role models like Ricky Martin and Johnny Weir. His opinions on the paradigm of the homosexual “closet,” the Stonewall riots, and the devastation wrought by AIDS and hate crimes are insightful and valid, reiterating how significantly those topics have contributed to the richly diversified cultural fabric of gay history in America.
Though occasionally rambling or repetitious, this fulfilling collection will certainly edify, enlighten and entertain.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59021-392-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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