Turning Stones: The Battle to Save Children at Risk

There may once have been a use and a market for a book that brings together, with little analysis or effort to assimilate, extraneous bits of information on homosexuality around the globe and throughout the ages. But that time has passed. With books as seriously good as John Boswell's Same Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe, on homosexual marriage in the Middle Ages, there is little room in the gay and lesbian sections of bookstores and libraries for the work in hand. At times a disjointed compendium of facts, at times an attempt at brief exposition of idiosyncratic opinion put forward as definitive analysis, the book provides only the occasional tidbit of interesting information (the origin of the name of the Mattachine Society, for example, or a particularly poignant story of a gay Vietnam vet). While discussing his notion that same-sex coupling is useful either as an effective method of birth control or as a way of purging unwanted genes from the human race, Spencer (The Heretic's Feast: A History of Vegetarianism) confusingly introduces a footnote to the effect that Critobulus, a character from Plato's Symposium, loved older and younger men, and was also married. This arbitrary and nonsensical technique is characteristic of the entire book. Benefiting from only a cursory though broad sort of research (basing entire sections on reports from a single source), the book never achieves authority. (June)