I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*
There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.
Continue reading “Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan”
This book just wasn’t for me. I felt like it took MONTHS to read (it only took two weeks, but it was two weeks too long). The publicist reached out to me a bout this book sometime in 2018 and I just now got around to it, so clearly I needed the time management, but apparently not much else in this book.*
Damnit. Now I want to move to South Bend, Indiana—well, maybe only a bit. I love my “mid-sized” Boston and “quaint” Cambridge, liberal East Coast elitist state a bit too much, to really consider it. I reached out to the publisher for a copy of this book after Mayor Pete announced his exploratory run for U.S. President.*
Toward the middle of last year I started accepting fewer and fewer unsolicited review requests, but periodically a few come up from publicists or publishers I’ve worked with previously and this was one of them.
Watson reached out to me about this way back in July of 2017, well ahead of publication. Unfortunately, due to an impossible work-life balance and other random crap I only just now got around to reading it.*