Beauvoir of the Divided Heart
Wartime Diary is a snapshot of a woman at a defining moment in world history, as well as a defining moment in her own career and philosophical development.
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Short Reviews
Reviews of Hiding in Plain Sight, The Nancy Book, and Troubled by RM Vaughan.
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Sibling Revelry
THE TWO oldest children of Thomas Mann, both born in the earliest years of the 20th century, were possessed of enormous intellect, charm, and charisma. They were openly gay in the case of Klaus, bisexual in the case of Erika; and they were decades ahead of their time.
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The Emasculation of Henry James
Henry and William were enrolled at Harvard while Bob and Wilkie were sent off to fight in the Civil War.
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Allan Bérubé’s Gift to History
THE OBITUARY OF ALLAN BÉRUBÉ that appeared in The New York Times began with a reference to his MacArthur Fellowship and then moved on to Coming Out Under Fire (1990), his groundbreaking history of gay men and lesbians during World War II. Such obvious attention to these two markers as the signal achievements of his life is understandable. The MacArthur award labeled Allan a “genius,” and a book about World War II planted him squarely in the mainstream of American history. As a topic, it is readily legible to almost everyone as “important.”
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Life and Times of a Cinematic Original
AS RESEARCH for Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, author William J. Mann befriended the famed film director and became his documentarian during the last two years of Schlesinger’s life as a stroke patient in Palm Springs. As a result, there is a loose, conversational tone to the book that places it somewhere between biography and memoir. …
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What else did they acquire?
OF THE MANY women who figured in the lives of Gertrude Stein and her circle in the early 20th century, the Cone sisters—fabulously wealthy, single women from Baltimore—stand out as power brokers in the Paris art world in their own right. Their money came from the family’s denim mills, the largest in the world. Although deeply steeped in the Victorian mores of their time, they bought “works by artists who, at the time, were dismissed as charlatans, or denounced as pornographers, and sometimes both,” in the words of Mary Gabriel in The Art of Acquiring.
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