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THE INTERMEDIARIES

A WEIMAR STORY

A richly detailed, prodigiously researched history.

The fight to affirm gender.

Drawing on abundant primary sources, medical historian Schillace, editor of the journal Medical Humanities, vividly depicts the maelstrom of race, politics, and scientific discovery that shaped attitudes about gender identity from 1890 to 1933 in Weimar, Germany. For homosexuals and nonbinary individuals, the period was fraught. Rapid industrial growth, immigration, and a growing women’s movement incited male panic about effeminate men and same-sex attraction. Closeted homosexuals, outed in scandalous exposure in the press, lost powerful positions. Central to her well-populated history is gay Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), whom Hitler called “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” In 1897, he established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose mission targeted the overthrow of Paragraph 175, an oppressive law that made homosexuality a crime. From his medical practice, Hirschfeld concluded that “discrete, tidy genders didn’t exist.” Instead, he posited a continuum of gender identities: nonbinary, trans, and queer individuals whom he called “intermediaries.” His Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, was a safe place where they could get counseling, hormonal treatment, and even surgery, including for patients who had tried, with dire results, to remove their own breasts or penises. Dora Richter, born Rudolf, was the first patient to undergo complete gender-affirming surgeries. Schillace recounts advances in endocrinology, beginning with the discovery of sex hormones and genes in 1905; the rise of eugenics, which fed Nazism; and the advent of Freudian psychotherapy. The history is appended with a glossary of pertinent terms in English and German, such as the now outdated “inversion” and “hermaphrodite”; capsule biographies of the large cast of characters; and a timeline of major scientific and political events. Hysteria about gender identity, Schillace warns, has never abated; the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights continues.

A richly detailed, prodigiously researched history.

Pub Date: May 13, 2025

ISBN: 9781324036319

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025

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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.

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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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