Stonewall Wasn’t the Start of the Gay Rights Struggle In the mid-1960s, activist Frank Kameny led a campaign for equality that was rooted in American ideals.
The New Terror in France Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France (And What it Means for Us), reviewed
I’m Running to Restore Yale’s Values I love Yale. It’s where I pursued a passion for sketch comedy, started writing a newspaper column, came out of the closet, and gained the critical-thinking skills that equipped me for a career in journalism. But recent events leave me worried that my alma mater is changing for the worse. A sign that something had...
‘Orbán’ Review: Hungary’s Strongman ORBÁN By Paul Lendvai Oxford, 273 pages, $29.95 In the summer of 1989, a bearded, shaggy-haired Viktor Orbán addressed a protest in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. In a speech lasting less than seven minutes, the 26-year-old law student called for an end to the communist dictatorship, the holding of free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet...
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...
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,...
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...
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...