Sorry, Naysayers, But America isn’t Over Yet The Myth of America’s Decline By Josef Joffe Liveright, 352 pages, $26.95 It may be hard to fathom today, but there was a time when the existence of a 23-inch-long satellite heralded America’s downfall. The tiny contraption in question was Sputnik, the launching of which by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 simultaneously set...
Mountain West Rashomon A revealing exposé suggests Matthew Shepard, the gay-rights martyr, may have actually been murdered over crystal meth, not his sexuality.
The Inside Story This Town By Mark Leibovich Penguin, pp.400, £17.99 Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as highly anticipated or amusing as This Town. Written by Mark Leibovich, the senior national correspondent for the New York Times magazine, it has been on the minds...
The Shameful Treatment of the Man Behind the Enigma Code Alan Turing, the man who developed the Enigma code that saved the Allied war effort, was not merely disregarded by his country. A homosexual, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and chemically castrated via forced oestrogen injections. Under unimaginable duress, he committed suicide. That it took until 2009 for the British government to...
A Nasty Piece of Work Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens Verso Books, 160 pages One of the journalistic impulses for which the late Christopher Hitchens will be remembered was a propensity for writing nasty obituaries of people he loathed immediately after their deaths. It was only a matter of days, sometimes hours, following the expiration of figures such as...
Life in the Iron Closet Out in Ost Berlin: Lesbians and Gays in the GDR In 1968, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) legalized homosexuality. Same-sex relations had long been proscribed by the infamous Paragraph 175, the Nazi-era law that not only criminalized homosexuality but led to the imprisonment and murder of thousands of gay people during the Holocaust. The GDR’s...
Inside Scientology’s Secret World Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief By Lawrence Wright Knopf, 448 pages, $28.95 Two years ago, New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright published an exhaustive report about screenwriter and director Paul Haggis’s theretofore unknown travails in and out of the Church of Scientology. Alongside global celebrities Tom Cruise and John Travolta, Haggis, (who...
Rotten in Denmark A Danish art exhibit attacks public figures who ‘insult’ but not those who issue death threats in response