Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 -

What has caused many people and societies to decide that homosexuality is acceptable and that gay and transgender men and women deserve rights and legal equality? In a labor of impressive scholarship, Reynolds (political science, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) demonstrates that LGBTQ individuals serving openly in the political realm have been the major instigators of this change. He makes his point in a collection of historical, exciting, and moving stories--stories with endings both tragic and happy. In the very beginning, Reynolds tells of Harvey Milk (1930-78) but also of Gilbert Baker (1951-2017), who created and sewed together the iconic rainbow flag. He includes histories of LGBTQ political advances from the South Pacific, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The diverse geographies of his vignettes remind one that along with the solid victories in the West, countless gay and transgender people throughout the world live continuously in the face of extreme violence. This volume joins such other valuable histories of the LGBTQ rights movement as Lisa Stulberg's LGBTQ Social Movements (CH, Oct'18, 56-0893) and Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (CH, Feb'16, 53-2763).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

The supposed righteousness of retribution has been a driving force of the legal system, without fully equating philosophical thinking that critically delineates the contours of blame and responsibility. Kelly (Tufts) challenges the prevailing retributivist theory of criminal justice, demonstrating the lack of alignment between law and morality. Arguably, the mismatch between criminal guilt and moral blame presents a moral problem for a punitive society that takes a judicial approach to social problems and criminals become second-class citizens for the rest of their lives. In the era of mass incarceration and its collateral damage, Kelly charges that it is time to revise norms that stigmatize and criminalize and address the consequential disconnect between the legal criteria of guilt and the moral criteria of blame. The Limits of Blame calls for a transformation in philosophical, legal, and public thinking about criminal justice. The book is beneficial in the areas of philosophy, jurisprudence, criminal law, penology, and criminal justice reform. It is a must read for all people vested in better understanding the current state of the criminal justice system, from over-policing to mass prosecutions and mass incarceration.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

A distinguished French cultural historian, Kalifa (Univ. of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne) gives a fascinating account of changing views of outcast society in Western culture. The author concentrates on the period from the 19th century to the mid-20th. By the 19th century the earlier image of the rogue had broadened into the notion of the dissolute, idle poor, who together with the criminal underworld became the "dangerous class." Crime and poverty, and possibly revolution, were thus associated. This dangerous class became a fixture of mass culture, evoking both fear and fascination. Writers like Charles Dickens and social investigators like Charles Booth reported on slum conditions. Taxonomy came to be employed in classifying the denizens of the underworld as a separate race with different physical and mental traits. The underworld even became the subject of tourism, with guides, commentary, and mandatory tour stops. By the 20th century the concept started to evaporate, thanks to the welfare state and the decriminalization of poverty. The world of crime became the world of organized crime and criminals were far from impoverished. Colorfully written, jargon free, and nicely translated, this volume suggests that every generation gets the underworld it needs.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.