Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis.
MoreOf all the famous people that Beaton wrote about, Hepburn received his most extreme wrath. He found her lacking in feminine grace and manners and accused her of being miserly and a bully.
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Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions Edited by Joseph Bristow Univ. of Toronto Press. 334 pages, $60. Tame Passions of Wilde: The Styles of Manageable Desire by Jeff Nunokawa Princeton…More
Stephen Harold Riggins and Paul Bouissac have shared an interesting life, having traveled the world and crossed paths with such intellectual luminaries as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Allan Bloom, Michel Foucault, A. J. Greimas, and John Cage. But in The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life, Riggins attempts to provide more than a romantic travelogue or eyewitness intellectual history.
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Taliban Photographs by Thomas Dworzak Essays by Dworzak, John Lee Anderson, Thomas Rees Trolley Books (UK) 128 pages (illustrations), $24.95 Arriving in Kandahar in July 2001, photographer Thomas…More
The photos in Picturing Men are organized not chronologically but by photographic setting, be it a studio, the deck of a boat, an athletic stadium, or a swimming hole. Other settings include a meeting of lodge brothers, a raucous drag routine, and lumberjacks on break.
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While it can serve nicely as a coffee-table book, sure to elicit laughs, sighs, and moans from browsers, Women in Pants is also a book of serious scholarship that will, as the authors suggest, “encourage more questions than it answers” and thus send at least some readers on a search for more information about the historical and cultural context for these fascinating images.
MoreWHILE the World Sleeps is a collection of previously published essays about AIDS from established writers as well as from individuals living with the disease. The range of essays that Chris Bull has assembled underscores the myriad cultural responses that the disease has generated over the last twenty years.
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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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Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin Edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise Cleis Press, 355 pages, $16.95, paper THIS AUGUST marked the…More
