Books

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

DEFENDER OF THE DAMNED: GLADYS TOWLES ROOT by Cy Rice, (Citadel, $4.95).

Purple jacket, lurid photographs, swooning prose and borrowed title (courtesy of Arthur Weinberg), this biographical work is just one more Nizerism-a book written about a lawyer for the purpose of blowing his own horn and promoting business. It has about as much literary merit as an advertisement for Wheaties.

The descriptions include cross-examination of several children, a prostitute and various husbands and wives accused of doing away with their mates. These passages are something less than startling, and the exhibition of the old needle-threading gambit in a rape case is so stale and dessicated as to make it necessary to pinch one's nostrils.

If Mr. Rice is to be believed, Mrs. Root's qualifications to practice law consist of an exposed bosom, fantastic clothing, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, a pair of lambs dyed to match her chromatic hair and peacocks that wear diapers; not to mention a talent for dragging busy doctors, hairdressers and department store managers out of bed in the middle of the night. It's hard to believe that the defense of persons charged with crime can depend upon these vaudeville antics or upon the occupancy of a fourteen-room office in the worst part of Hill St., down-

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town Los Angeles, with a black marble bathroom.

The author makes quite an issue of Mrs. Root's sympathy for homophiles, whom he calls alternately "deviates" and "perverts." He quotes her as saying, "You are sick. You have broken the laws of God, man, and nature. You need help." A "pervert" client is quoted: "Being a social outFor sex education in the public schools she recommends films entitled "Girls Beware," "Boys Beware," and "Seduction of the Innocent."

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Nowhere in the book is there anything about the profundity or majesty of the law, or about the intensive research into the law required of the serious practitioner. The author has made his protagonist into a circus performer who cannot be taken seriously as an advocate in defense of human rights.

If Mrs. Root wants to be regarded as a lawyer, not a clotheshorse with spectacularly bad taste, she had better hire a different press agent.

Pearl Hart

BRIGHT DAY, DARK RUNNER by George Cuomo, Doubleday, 1964, $5.95, 421 pp.

One begins reading this novel with the firm conviction that he will not like it. The first-person protagonist, J. (for Judas) I. LeBlanche, is one of the world's greatest cooks, by his

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