John LougheryRecensioni

A real mix. I wouldn't have selected all of these, but enjoyed many, especially Auden's piece on detective stories, King's Birmingham jail letter, and Asia's essay on recognizing herself as a writer.

Like her contemporary, Fr. Thomas Merton, there is renewed interest in the life and writings of Dorothy Day. With this comes a new detailed biography by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. It is a full biography. The reader gains a focused picture of Day, the people she knew, the books she read, and the struggles she had. For anyone with interest in Day or the Catholic Workers movement, this book will be required reading.

This book will be released in March 2020. I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and impartial review.

I skimmed this for a class last fall, and am just now getting around to reading it in-depth. Upon full reading, though, I'm much more impressed than I was the beginning. Loughery pares a complex history down to a coherent narrative that neither imposes a "progress" story nor bemoans "culture nowadays." He gives a factual overview, but fills it with emotional stories. He focuses on a central story about mostly white gay men in America, but is always aware that men of color, bisexuals, lesbians, and trans people are part of this story, calling out the mainstream gay groups for actively excluding those people. He also maintains an awareness of regional differences and philosophical divisions, even while creating a national story.

The book was written in the 1990s, and Loughery's final reflections strongly reflect that, but I appreciate how strongly that position comes through rather than being buried or misleading and thus making the book less useful for modern readers. With that clarity, The Other Side of Silence remains vital basic reading for anyone interested in gay/queer history or how the American situation became what it is today.

A great collection of essays on a wild range of subjects. A great way to get a taste of some great authors.

It's a well-researched, balanced biography on a very complex subject. W H Wright (Van Dine's real name) was an elusive and contradictory character, very difficult to put your finger on. On the other hand, his life is well-documented through hundreds of letters, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, and numerous acquaintances. He was a dogmatic and ferocious art critic, a great expender of money, and up to his forties he lived from hand to mouth for several years. The Philo Vance mystery novels allowed him to become rich and live like the European intellectual dandy he aspired to be (sort of Gabrielle d'Annunzio or J-K. Huysmans). His mystery novels have aged a lot but are still a touchstone for anyone who wants to know what mystery writing in America was in the 1930s.