Rich Shall Inherit, The Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the unforgettable and totally captivating story of Poppy Mallory. From Poppy's tragic youth spent with a n'er-do-well gambling addict who allowed her to be raised by ladies of the evening and orphanages, to her rise as a notorious woman of France, I was totally engrossed in finding out what would happen next. A life punctuated by lost love and the great sadness of giving birth to two children she could never fully know, make this one of the best novels I've read this year.
When investigative journalist Mike Preston is commissioned to find the missing heir/heiress to Poppy Mallory's fortune, he uncovers an incredibly tangled family tree and uproots all its darkest secrets. From California to Venice to Paris and around the globe, this fascinating story unfolds with a richly-textured plot and distinctive characters.
From the very beginning, when Poppy's father Jeb Mallory concocts a plan with immigrant Nikolas Konstant, the story leads readers on a magical mystery of scandals, lies, and deception. Who will emerge as the true heir becomes almost second in importance to the interesting lives Poppy, her friends, and descendents live. Her childhood friends Angel and Greg Konstant, her first love Felipe and her unforgettable lover Franco as well as all the offspring of these characters are woven into a remarkable tale that you won't want to put down. This book is ingenious, well-plotted, and totally intriguing. I look forward to reading more by this author.

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Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco Review

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(More customer reviews)There is certainly no dearth of historical work on sexuality and San Francisco, but Sides' contribution proves to be both productive and revelatory--in short, Sides has seriously moved urban and sexual history forward (he goes beyond the 1990s). And he has moved it well: Erotic City is truly a page turner!
Building on the work of historians such as Nan Boyd (see: Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965), Sides not only maps San Francisco in terms of the still-resonant political and cultural developments that have taken place there since the WWII, but he does so by bringing readers to the streets, from neighborhood to neighborhood, so that we can witness the way in which the city was shaped by its many sexual "revolutions." What's more, Sides brings "heterosexuality" back into the postwar historiography of sexual geography in an artful way--before you know it, you've been transplanted from a discussion of pornography, to leather S/M clubs, to radical feminism, so that the reading experience comes to mirror rapidly changing cityscape itself.
One of many interesting details Sides marshals (a concept which comes up only very briefly in Marc Stein's City Of Sisterly And Brotherly Loves: Lesbian And Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972) is that gay men were, for the Castro, the foot soldiers of gentrification--a point which has hitherto lacked sufficient attention in urban histories of sexuality. All told, Sides details the way in which the shifting spatial relations of power in the Erotic City were active in the production of sexuality and sexual experiences (in the most broad sense--read the book) as well as the way in which the city hosted and even created the conditions for the emergence of sexual identities, political factions, social and judicial controversies, and even revolutionary public health measures. And that emergent sexuality in turn left it's mark (for better and for worse) on the city.
All said, Erotic City is a tour-de-force tour of a city that you thought you knew.

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