Martin B. Duberman

Although best known for his acclaimed biographies, historian Martin Duberman is also a renowned memoirist who has plumbed his own life for truths that have meaning for us all. In the bestselling Cures, he carried his story up to 1970, focusing on his fear that homosexuality was pathological and on his desperate search for a therapeutic cure. Duberman's second autobiographical book, Midlife Queer, centered on the 1970s, by which time he'd thrown off his earlier doubts and become fully engaged in the worlds of gay politics and culture. Waiting to Land takes Duberman's story up to the present day. As his public engagement deepens, Duberman finds himself increasingly at odds with the mounting assimilationism of the mainstream gay movement -- and with the left itself, which Duberman has come to believe is smugly oblivious to the realities of gay life. Disaffection leads him to till crucial new ground, including the founding of the groundbreaking Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) and serving as an original board member of Queers for Economic Justice. Interweaving diary entries with letters and with reflections written in 2008, Waiting to Land incisively probes issues of crucial import for everyone. By turns moving, funny, provocative, and profound, this book is an unflinchingly honest and deeply important window into an extraordinary life.

From the Publisher: Four inspiring, bold political plays that bring history alive as theater, from the Bancroft Prize-winning historian, cultural critic, and public intellectual.

Lincoln Kirstein’s contributions to the nation’s life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary journal Hound and Horn, as well as the modernist Harvard Society for Contemporary Art—forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He brought George Balanchine to the United States, and in service to the great choreographer’s talent, persisted, against heavy odds, in creating both the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Among much else, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center in New York, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; established the pathbreaking Dance Index and the country’s first dance archives; and in some fifteen books proved himself a brilliant critic of art, photography, film, and dance. But behind this remarkably accomplished and renowned public face lay a complex, contradictory, often tortured human being. Kirstein suffered for decades from bipolar disorder, which frequently strained his relationships with his family and friends, a circle that included many notables, from W. H. Auden to Nelson Rockefeller. And despite being married for more than fifty years to a woman whom he deeply loved, Kirstein had a wide range of homosexual relationships throughout the course of his life. This stunning biography, filled with fascinating perceptions and incidents, is a major act of historical reclamation. Utilizing an enormous amount of previously unavailable primary sources, including Kirstein’s untapped diaries, Martin Duberman has rendered accessible for the first time a towering figure of immense complexity and achievement.

With searing self-appraisal and a keen sense of the world around him, acclaimed writer and gay activist Martin Duberman examines a wide range of issues in his personal and professional life and in the politics of the time from 1971 to 1981—from the early years of gay liberation to the first public reports of AIDS. Duberman moves from the internecine battles in the academic world and within the budding gay rights movement to his own heart attack, sexual and romantic adventures, and search for fulfillment through new therapies and the world of theater. Peppered with gossip, wit, and tart observations of the New York theater and literary worlds, Midlife Queer stands as both a fascinating memoir and a record of an era.

A biography of the actor and singer renowned all over the world for his interpretations of various operatic roles.

Martin Duberman's classic memoir of growing up gay in pre-Stonewall America. The tale of his desperate struggle to "cure" himself of his homosexuality through psychotherapy is utterly frank and deeply moving. But Cures is more than one man's story; it's the vivid, witty account of a generation, of changing times, shifting social attitudes, and the rising tide of protest against received wisdom.

"In the first major biography of Stonewall Jackson in more than thirty years, Byron Farwell's research into the life of the most charismatic figure of the Civil War reveals a quirky, obsessive, dark personality radically different from the storybook version that grew up after Jackson's untimely death in 1863." "Jackson was an odd country boy who conquered his limitations of education and intellect by excluding any activity not crucial to his work, who showed an almost pathological indifference to danger during the Mexican War, who spent most of his career in disputes and litigation with his professional colleagues. An interesting sidelight on the private Jackson is that his sister, to whom he wrote almost daily for many years, divorced her husband for his secessionist beliefs." "Of Jackson's military genius, of his ability to extract superhuman effort from his troops, there can be no doubt. But the flaws here are fascinating as well: he did not follow orders precisely; he fell asleep at the oddest moments, as in church, or in staff meetings with General Lee; he did not communicate well with subordinate officers; and when Jackson was mortally wounded at Chancellorsville on the verge of a major victory, the advantage was lost because no one knew what he intended to do. One of the most controversial aspects of the book is Farwell's analysis of what would have happened had Jackson survived to fight at Gettysburg and beyond." "Farwell's lively narrative is balanced by careful research on every battle and facet of Jackson's life. The result is an honest, often unflattering, but nonetheless deeply sympathetic portrait of this legendary commander."--BOOK JACKET.

As a political reward, transit cop Richard Corrigan joins New York governor Fielding Dawson's entourage on a camping trip in the Wyoming wilderness. Once there, accidents start occurring with deadly consequences until only three of the original party remain.

Dramatized history of the Negro in the United States.

"The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West. Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative. One of the most renowned historians of the American left and LGBTQ movement, as well as a pioneering social-justice activist, Duberman reviews the fifty years since Stonewall with an immediacy and rigor that informs and energizes. He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society, and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost--the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion. Illuminating the fault lines both within and beyond the movements of the past and today, this critical book is also hopeful: Duberman urges us to learn from this history to fight for a truly inclusive and expansive society."--Dust jacket.