An eye-opening guide to the American LGBTQ+ community and its history in some surprising places.
A sweeping reference volume about LGBTQ+ people, institutions, and lore from all over the country.
Stout, a Minneapolis employment attorney and community organizer, surveys the LGBTQ+ community in every state—and in U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and Guam—including red state heartlands as well as blue state urban enclaves. Each brief chapter features photos and lavish illustrations of people and places by artists Bye and Écija and contains paragraphlong entries on notable people, living or dead, who were born in each state; local cultural fixtures, such as bars and bookstores, pride parades, and advocacy organizations; and historical milestones, including ordinances and statutes. The book is, in part, a kind of Who’s Who in LGBTQ+ America, saluting luminaries such as Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, but there’s also plenty of less-sung writers, artists, activists, and businesspeople. For example, there’s a veritable roll call of pathbreakers, such as Anchorage, Alaska, assembly member Felix Rivera, “one of the first two gay men ever elected to the Alaskan government,” and Reed Erickson, “The first transgender person to earn an engineering degree from Louisiana State University.” Stout unearths some intriguing historical figures, as well, including Michael Wigglesworth, a 17th-century Puritan minister whose diary reveals his torment over his attraction to male Harvard students; Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a lesbian couple in early-19th-century Vermont; and Joe Monahan, a transgender miner and cowboy on the Idaho frontier. (The author’s self-described “speculation” about Abraham Lincoln’s sexuality is a bit of a stretch, however.) Stout unsurprisingly finds a rich trove of lore on the LGBTQ+ community in New York and California, but he also helpfully discovers stories in places such as Thurmond, West Virginia, “the smallest town in the U. S. to pass an LBGTQ+ anti-discrimination ordinance.” Overall, Stout’s encyclopedia-style prose is workmanlike and never lyrical, and his choice of entries feels somewhat haphazard. However, casual readers, students, tourists, or new U.S. residents trying to get their bearings will find this to be a useful sourcebook—one that demonstrates the LGBTQ+ community’s deep roots in American soil.
An eye-opening guide to the American LGBTQ+ community and its history in some surprising places.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63489-257-5
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Wise Ink Creative Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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