Playing it Straight CLOSET QUEENS By Michael Bloch Little, Brown, e-book, $21.99 Several years ago, I found myself at a dinner party hosted by Cambridge University’s Adonian Society. The all-male Adonians, as their name impishly suggests, are a select group of undergraduates and their faculty admirers, along with hangers-on from the British elite. The setting was a cavernous...
Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other? The word “pundit” has its origins in an ancient Sanskrit term meaning “knowledge owner.” Today used to describe the denizens of cable news, who shout over one another no matter what the topic, it denotes not so much studiously acquired expertise than know-it-all smarminess. Think Bill O’Reilly on the right or Keith Olbermann on the left: loudmouth“wingnuts”...
The Putin Show Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia By Peter Pomerantsev PublicAffairs, 254 pages As a television producer living in Moscow during the early years of the 21st century, Peter Pomerantsev witnessed many strange things. There was the visit to Chechnya to meet the world’s biggest boy (who, at...
Václav Havel: Disturber of the Peace HAVEL: A LIFE By Michael Zantovsky (Grove Atlantic, 543 pages, $30) The life of Václav Havel had all the makings of a fairy tale. The son of a wealthy property owner dispossessed of his holdings by the Czechoslovak communist regime, Havel (1936-2011) was denied higher education on account of his bourgeois upbringing. Not to be discouraged,...
See the Met’s "Klinghoffer," Then Judge It I don’t understand what all the meshugas is about. “Who could have imagined/Such a business/Such a meshugas?” cries Marilyn Klinghoffer, a passenger on the doomed Achille Lauro cruise ship coasting through the Mediterranean. Little does she know at the time that her husband, a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound New York Jew named Leon Klinghoffer, has just been shot by a Palestinian...
Revising the History of Gay Marriage Redeeming the Dream By David Boies and Theodore B. Olson (Viking, 310 pages, $28.95) Forcing the Spring By Joe Becker (Penguin, 470 pages, $29.95) In the United States, the public debate over same-sex marriage goes back at least as far as 1970, when two male students at the University of Minnesota attempted to obtain a...
Does Mugabe Have a Conscience? Most people would not suspect Robert Mugabe of harboring a guilty conscience. The 89-year-old President of Zimbabwe has ruled the southern African nation for 34 years, making him one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. The results of his misbegotten reign form a uniquely depressing catalog in the annals of post-colonial Africa: the erstwhile “jewel” and...
Hungarian Rhapsody I Kiss Your Hands Many Times By Marianne Szegedy-Maszák Spiegel & Grau, 370 pages, $19.96 Growing up as the children of Hungarian refugees, Marianne Szegedy-Maszák and her siblings knew their lives “were destined to be less interesting, less accomplished, less erudite, and less meaningful than those of the adults.” That may seem to run counter...