Douglass Shand-Tucci's previous books include The Art of Scandal, the bestselling biography of Isabella Steward Gardner; Boston Bohemia, and, most recently, Harvard University, with photographs by Richard Cheek and a foreword by Neil Rudenstine. The origin of The Crimson Letter is a speech Shand-Tucci, a 1972 graduate of Harvard College, gave to the Gay and Lesbian Caucus in 1997. He lives in Boston's Back Bay.
"Sophisticated scandal and spicy anecdote."
"Sophisticated scandal and spicy anecdote."
Fair Harvard occupies a hallowed position in America as an epicenter of intellectual achievement and liberal thought, but in his chronicle of the gay men who have passed through Harvard Yard, Shand-Tucci (The Art of Scandal) reveals that it is also a gay mecca. After establishing two archetypes-the warrior, exemplified by Walt Whitman, and the artist, exemplified by Oscar Wilde-the author seldom refers to them again as he catalogs a formidable list of names. Everyone is here, from obscure academics to familiar 19th-century sacred cows (e.g., Emerson, Thoreau, and James) to more modern totems (Aaron Copeland, T.S. Eliot, and Lincoln Kerstein). The famous are presented here without individuality or reality, existing in a rarified, insular world largely populated with other Harvard alumni; gay Bostonian life is barely sketched. Impressively researched, as if striving to live up to the author's own Cantabrigian credentials, the book lacks the universality of other regional chronicles, such as Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis. This elitist, self-congratulatory work will be of limited appeal to libraries outside of Boston.-Richard J. Violette, Special Libs., Victoria, B.C. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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