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Friday, November 8, 2024
THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, clarion call to women everywhere: get out of your own way, we need you
THE RULEBREAKER: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
SUSAN PAGE
Simon & Schuster
$30.99 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.
Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.
Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Fighting misogyny, antisemitism, and the apathy of the public was one helluva training ground for becoming a powerful presence on the US cultural map. Her drive, and her zeal for journalism as a contact sport, were unprecedented in the pop culture of the 1960s. Her success was fueled by huge ambition...she would not fail in her duty to her chosen calling, like her father had done, and she would use every ounce of her will to make things happen her way.
These qualities are, annoyingly, still considered male. She out-manned the majority of men, then, and did it in a skirt and heels. It seems to me it's time to put down the bludgeon this kind of thinking represents to knock women back into antique roles that make "men" (boys, really) feel comfortable. Walters was a power in politics, a power in entertainment, and used her power to influence people to think. Even her celebrity interviews were impactful, raising or restoring some to new or renewed influence. She didn't lie to the people, she asked honest questions, and she never showed up unprepared.
The main thing I think made her a legend was her careful control...of herself, of her material, of her image. She didn't love Gilda Radner's SNL character "Baba Wawa" yet, when sending a condolence note to Radner's widower, she signed it "Baba Wawa"...and made sure this fact was known. Careful image curation is not the sole province of today's influencers. Her clarity of thought when she was at her peak was unrivaled. Even in later years her ability to present questions her audience would really like the answers to made her a popular figure on the cultural landscape.
Like all driven people, she left damage in her wake. She was rubbish as a mother, shouldn't've adopted a child; she was not a good wife, or a good partner, but there's no one to blame for that except societal expectations. No one ever whinges about the failings and failures of famous men in those regards. She was a force of nature. Those people are hurricanes, tornados, epic tsunamis. They aren't domesticated or domesticatable.
I suspect I'd've disliked the woman had I ever met her. She comes across in these interviews and the author's analysis as the kind of self-absorbed person who ignores you unless you're immediately useful. I dislike and mistrust those people. I can admire what she did without having warm personal feelings for her. Trailblazers and groundbreakers burn and break; it's in the epithets. Comfortable friends? Not likely. Powerful allies? Yes indeed, and that's enough! Adjusting expectations to match what's really there, what's on actual offer, is a key skill in the life of a person who sees a need for change and sets out to effect it.
Read this careful, honest, thorough story of one remarkable woman's life to feel inspired yourself. Gift it to your girlchild who is nosy, noisy, and obstreperous, that she may channel her talents into service. We need women to ask questions and require answers to them just like Barbara Walters did. We need women to confront idiots and show them up as idiots just like Barbara Walters did. Showing your girlchildren that it's been done, and done well, is a great way to get them to do the same.
Who knows who they'll end up photographed next to, or whose highlight reel they'll be responsible for, or whose foolishness they'll expose to end it? Barbara Walters had pages and pages and pages of evidence she had made a difference before she died. An ambition to be like her isn't a bad thing to ignite in young women.
Thursday, November 7, 2024
THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL, hope in dark times...aimed directly at older gay men
THE SPRING BEFORE OBERGEFELL
BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG
University of Nebraska Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$20.85 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: It’s not easy for anyone to find love, let alone a middle-aged gay man in small-town America. Mike Breck works multiple part-time jobs and bickers constantly with his father, an angry conservative who moved in after Mike’s mother died. When he’s not working or avoiding his father, Mike burns time on hookup apps, not looking for anything more. Then he meets a local guy, Dave, just as lonely as he is, and starts to think that maybe he doesn’t have to be alone. Mike falls hard, and in a moment of intimacy, his pent-up hopes for a relationship rush out, leading him to look more honestly at himself and his future.
Winner of the James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel, Ben Grossberg’s The Spring Before Obergefell is about real guys who have real problems, yet still manage to find connection. Funny, serious, meditative, and hopeful, The Spring Before Obergefell is a romance—but not a fairytale.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I so relate to Matteo, Mike's first RL shot at Love. Catalyzes something good and big; doesn't get to participate, too acerbic and just Too Much.
It's a curse, unless of course it's not. It felt very very good to read Dave and Mike's borning relationship.
A story set ten years ago about the challenges of forming relationships as gay men in homophobic Murrika. There has never been a moment where this subject, treated with hope, has been more welcome. We're now looking into the maw of Project 2025. *horripilation*
Nothing in this book leads me to believe the author was predicting the future as he wrote it. It's still a welcome moment of hope in a bleak landscape. Part of keeping hope alive is to feed it. The Spring Before Obergefell offers readers, gay men in particular, and older gay men for sure, a story that deals with the reality of family in this new age of darkness. There is always hope. It feels like there is not sometimes. Mike and his world...well...hope is what he found. That message trumps all the noise and chaos of the world.
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
BEING KIND: How to Add More Meaning to Your Moments, a clarion call to act
BEING KIND: How to Add More Meaning to Your Moments
KOBI YAMADA (illus. Charles Santoso)
Compendium (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 hardcover, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Why does kindness matter? Because there's no such thing as a small act of kindness—each one nourishes and enriches. This heartwarming book is a celebration of the part we each can play in creating a more compassionate world.
Written by New York Times bestselling author Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Charles Santoso, the creators behind the beloved Finding Muchness, this enchanting book illuminates how a simple deed can have extraordinary impact. Captivating artwork of a loveable sloth pairs with bite-sized wisdom to remind readers of the power we each have to uplift one another. It's a heartwarming invitation to be kind to someone—and to remember that you are someone too!
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I haven't got the words to explain why kindness matters in a horrifying, cruel world that is getting rapidly crueler. Be kind to yourselves, and to each other.
We need to take care of each other. It is, now more than ever, clear we're the only ones who will.
NIGHTMARE.
Resist. Start here. This list is political books reviewed. This list is economics books reviewed. Both are updated when a new review comes out.
Monday, November 4, 2024
OCTOBER'S OCEAN, charming romantic YA story with a strong young gay lead
OCTOBER'S OCEAN
DELAINE COPPOCK
Tuxtails Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Halloween on Jute Island is like a walking, talking costume parade. That's probably why Seth didn't notice her at first.
The old black dress, wild hair and accent didn't exactly stand out in October. But there is something about Peggy that draws Seth in. He hadn't felt anything but empty since Colin died, but suddenly he feels curious. And who is this new boy in town with ocean eyes that Seth can't look away from?
As the waves of loss threaten to pull Seth under, his love of music and his new friends might just lead him back to shore.
The Summer I Turned Pretty meets Outlander in this beautiful story of teenage love, loss and friendship.
I RECEIVED THIS AS A GIFT. THANK YOU.
My Review: I think older people are either oblivious to, or too uncomfortable to deal with, the gigantic crisis of grief young men are going through. Our in/actions have landed these culturally disadvantaged people in the midst of a life-threatening lacuna in an already thin mental-health safety net for their group. Seth is grieving his lost Colin, and he's male, so doubly not encouraged to discuss this raw, ravaging grief.
I don't think the gay youth suicide epidemic goes unnoticed anymore, but I do think its precursor states like depression and loss go vastly undertreated. If you are, or are aware of, a young person in emotional need, The Trevor Project (link above) is a resource to tap as soon as possible. Doing nothing, not acknowledging the problem or thinking it could just go away, is not a wise choice of coping mechanism. Please reach out, for yourself or to learn more about how you can extend help to your own life's Seth. The rewards are real for those who take action and so are the risks for those who don't.
The story told here is one of gaining perspective and using it to forge a new relationship to life and living with loss. I am a sour old man, well past the perspectiveless, trackless desert that is queer adolescence, so read this story as definite outsider. I was so moved. I was so happy to feel the force of Author Coppock's story. If *I* get it, feel it, am charmed by it, I can see how and understand why a gay young man in a vulnerable state would find it very comforting. We do well to comfort before we make demands of these young men...they get so little of it. The lifelong consequences are more or less invisible, it seems to me at least, and we as adults should make more and better efforts to change this.
Start small. Give this charming story to the queer lad in your orbit.
I learned of this book from its agent/editor, Erik McManus, via his YouTube channel. I'm very glad that I did because I got to enjoy a charming slightly-supernatural romantic story to fill my spooky-season reading card, and found a story that I feel is rooted in an emotional reality underacknowledged in queer culture.
QUEER AS FOLKLORE: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters, straight-peoples' anxieties and hostilities seen from the other side
QUEER AS FOLKLORE: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters
SACHA COWARD
Unbound
$25.00 trade paper, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Queer as Folklore takes readers across centuries and continents which reveals the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new.
Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way. Queer communities have often sought refuge in the shadows, found kinship in the in-between and created safe spaces in underworlds; but these forgotten narratives tell stories of remarkable resilience that deserve to be heard.
Join any Pride march and you are likely to see a glorious display of papier-mâché unicorn heads trailing sequins, drag queens wearing mermaid tails and more fairy wings than you can shake a trident at. But these are not just accessories: they are queer symbols with historic roots.
To truly understand who queer people are today, we must confront the twisted tales of the past and Queer as Folklore is a celebration of queer history like you've never seen it before.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Funny how the stories of queerness, of love between same-sex couples, are so very often found in "monster" tales, isn't it. I mean, the rise of vampire fiction as AIDS bit gay men hard is a tough sell as coincidence. Back a way we have Dr. Fankenstein building his perfect man, who then gets all freaked out because he isn't just like the other boys; we have the enduring folktale of Beauty and the Beast, as queer a metaphor as you can find; we have the Greek gods taking outlandishly unlikely forms to get off with humans.
And that's just the Western world.
In modern times there are the just barely clothed superheroes in comic-book or filmed form, flaunting their junk in our faces at $25 a ticket or graphic novel (aka comic book) with oblivious or deeply in denial boys of all ages perving on their favorite characters' amazing prowess without seeming to have a single introspective neuron firing. These hypermasculine avatars of (mostly) toxic masculinity go around destroying things with their unstoppable powers; what better way for these theater-loads of bottoms to get their desperate need to be dominated, wrecked, brutalized met safely and without admitting to themselves their need is deeply, deeply sexual? Likewise the astonishing-to-me rise of RuPaul and drag as mass entertainment...male parodies of femininity enacted for the audience's titillated amusement. There is no filmed entertainment of any sort that doesn't rely on the universal human lust for voyeurism. If I'm at all honest, that applies to literature and reading as well.
Those sour reflections out of the way, let's talk about the *fun* of it all.
The author's done a creditable job of assembling fun examples of myths and folktales that present queerness in a framework of plausible deniability, as has ever been the case. We've always been here...just have to listen to the quiet parts in between the blaring trumpets of heteronormativity. Only in recent times have we been able to say the quiet parts out loud, and it makes the control freaks and haters absolutely wild with fury that anyone could not want to be exactly like them.
Hm. I seem not to have left the sourness behind after all. Well, take the rough with the smooth, laddies and gentlewomen. I listen to unreflective heteronormativity all day every day. Listen to how it feels to be consciously aware of the receiving end of a microaggression for a change. It's never been what you meant, it's always been what the audience hears.
The audience for this survey course in queer identity is in for a treat in terms of the author's clear desire to bring us history burnished to a mellow, shadow-melting glow of inclusion. The care with which he draws lines between what modern people mean by queerness, and the often very different understandings of gender and sexuality people held in earlier times, is both commendable and clarifying. It enables us to respond honestly from within our framework to stories coming from a different framework. It's often done anecdotally, using reports of experience, so data-driven readers might not like this narrative choice. We're in the unabahedly popular arena in this book. Applying academic rigor to the way the author informs us of the existence and the resonances of queer icons in our (Western) cultural history is unwarranted.
Breadth and anecdotality (I think I just invented that word) are both strengths and weaknesses. As always. No tool cannot also function as a weapon. I did wonder at times where the heck Author Coward found his examples of modern peoples' resonances with the stories we inherited from the foreparents. At times this is my favorite thing about the read; at others, it feels...grafted on, placed too carefully to feel entirely natural.
I am mostly unhappy, to the extent I actually am, with the absence of world cultures' representation. I understand this isn't sold or described as about world cultures, but tell me in the subtitle..."The Hidden Queer History of Western Myths and Monsters, f/ex...that I'm not getting this broader focus. I promise I'd still buy and read it. So now you know where that last half-star went.
Still a good read, still a great gift, still something I want people to know is available for their amusement and edification.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
THE GHOST THEATRE, power to the alt-Elizabethan London lovers!
THE GHOST THEATRE
MAT OSMAN
The Overlook Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$12.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A wild and hallucinatory reimagining of Elizabethan London, with its bird worshippers, famed child actors, and the Queen herself; a dazzling historical novel about theatre, magic, and the dangers of all-consuming love
London, 1601—a golden city soon to erupt in flames. Shay is a messenger-girl, falconer, and fortune teller who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city’s fabled Blackfriars Theatre, where a cast of press-ganged boys perform for London’s gentry. When the pair meet, Shay falls in love with the performances—and with Nonesuch himself. As their bond deepens, they create the Ghost Theatre, an underground troupe that performs fantastical plays in the city’s hidden corners. As their fame grows the troupe fans the flames of rebellion among the city’s outcasts, and the lovers are drawn into the dark web of the Elizabethan court. Embattled, with the plague on the rise throughout the country, the Queen seeks a reading from Shay, a moment which unleashes chaos not only in Shay’s life, but across the whole of England too.
A fever-dream full of prophecy and anarchy, gutter rats and bird gods, Mat Osman’s The Ghost Theatre is a wild ride from the rooftops of Elizabethan London to its dark underbelly, and a luminous meditation on double lives and fluid identities and the bewitching, transformative nature of art and power, with a bittersweet love affair at its heart. Set amid the vividly rendered England of Osman’s imagination and written in rich, seductive prose, The Ghost Theatre will have readers under its spell from the very first page.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Mat Osman, brother of Richard, tries his hand at fantasy noveling...outta the park, buddy, what a genre debut! Co-founder of Suede, a quintessential 90s Brit-emo-boy band, decides to write something not centered in the music culture. Great decision! Tackling the end of Elizabethan London, adding a layer of fantastical performance art to it, made this a book I approached with some trepidation. His earlier novel, The Ruins, was a powerful read set in a modern world heightened but still mudane. It was imperfect in its characters' grapplings with desire, the desire to be one's self, the desire to be valued and still free, but it was a fine read.
Here we get the thing I missed in The Ruins. Shay is a cross-dressing woman (it's safer in this world to present as a man) who falls in with young actor Nonesuch (recalling as you do that female roles in Elizabethan theaters were played by crossdressing boys) after her bird-worshipping cult is disrupted by violence. Violence, societal down to interpersonal, is the refrain of this operatic tale of escape, concealment, and ultimately discovery. Violence rules this novel. Shay, rescued from violence, and Nonesuch, accustomed to its sexual expression, decide to become performers of stories that aren't about the great and good. They tell stories like the one they've just shared in which they stave off rage and hate, but pay a price in the process. They know not to try to compete for center stage with those stories of the great and good. They take to the corners, they lurk in the shadows among those like themselves who, stunned, see themselves in the stories the Ghost Theatre duo are telling.
The power of seeing yourself in a story is hard to overstate.
Soon the pair, intimately connecting to the hoi polloi of their class, are attracting crowds. That means they're also attracting notice. The great and good, the primacy, inescapability, of whose stories drove the pair to rebel, are suddenly attentive and making them very much in fashion. They're getting noticed by the elite who never knew they were alive before.
Ask a gay person outed in heteroland, a Black person in whiteworld, a trans person anywhere, how that feels.
Passionately pursuing Truth is, I think, only safe for the young and powerless. They have little to lose. They have no kind of perspective, but this irresistible draw to honesty and truth and self-realization is the road traveled to acquire a lifetime's supply of that missing perspective. This is a subtractive, even divisive process. Shay and Nonesuch ignite passion and create magic with their Ghost Theatre. Fire metaphors for growing up, for attaining wisdom, are apt: annealed in flames of their own ignition, the entire troupe burn in the brightness of fame's flames.
When the bill comes due, the prices (plural) are high; the perspective, one is left to hope in the ending that gives no closure, they've earned will keep them safer than they are during the story.
I can't get to a fifth star because the way we move, bob, and weave in this narrative is sufficiently non-linear as to make the journey circular in affect. Has anything fundamental, or even just more than cosmetic, changed?
I'm not sure; I'm only sure I love the Aviscultans, and the Ghost Theatre, and the honest portrayal of the power of Love among the powerlessness of Others to make a life of struggle feel as though it's a Quest, a magical, important affirmation of Life.
Sadly it never really is, or not for long. That knowlege, though, is mine, not the characters'. Beautiful-sounding, complicated, and still the story's in the end slighter than it feels while you are within it.
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