The narrator of the six stories included in the slender volume by an exiled president of Portugal (elected in 1923, resigned in 1925 and going into exile in 1926 when fascist rule began there) is something of a seducer in what strikes me more as a Hapsburg/Central European than a Mediterranean way. Surprisingly, only one of the stories (the last one in the volume, "Dead Woman's Grove") is set in Portugal. It and the first and longest story ("Deus ex Machina," set in the Netherlands) involve consummated romances (fornication in the first, adultery in the last). The relationships in all six of the stories are cut off before the rake narrator tired of his conquests and was ready to move on, with several involving the tragic demise or removal of the woman before an agreed-upon rendez-vous in Spain or Italy or Turkey, and another with the quarry slipping away before agreeing to a rendez-vous.

None of the stories is at all sexually graphic. The shorter stories (the middle four) are slight. "Deux ex Machina" and "Question Mark" are the most entertaining (with considerable irony turned on the narrator's youthful self), "Dead Woman's Grove" the most melodramatic. (I'm surprised it hasn't been turned into an opera.).

The collected writings of Manuel Teixeira-Gomes's stories invoke the pre-World War I era of cosmopolitan European seduction games. With storm clouds of another war massing over Europe in 1934, when the stories were written, the balance between nostalgia and laughing at the youthful seducer's self-infatuation is tipped more to the former.

The title novella and three shorter works translator Alberto Manguel drew from 1970s collections in Spanish of Argentine writer Alberto Denevi's fiction all deal with nearly desperate hopes-a recently orphaned adolescent gay bartender's hope for a patron (who will whisk him away from the frustrations of serving bitter queens), an aging female poet's hope to be better appreciated posthumously than she has been in her lifetime which may be over, a pair of aging spinsters' hope to meet the only other nocturnal resident of a once fashionable apartment building that is now mostly offices, and an unbelievably buxom vaudeville performer's hope to have finally found someone to love and treasure here (and get her out of the tawdry theater at which she pretends to be a Caribbean cannibal).

I am puzzled by translator Manguel's assertion that Denevi's prime interest is in plot, because except in the first story, Michel, there does not seem to me to be much in the way of plot in the four fictions. They are, instead, long on character development, with lives of quiet and not-so-quiet desperation. Although the denouement is very sudden in "Michel," I most like it and "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." I find "Letter to Gianfranco" and "The Redemption of the Cannibal Woman" overwrought-both in literary style and in their protagonists' wild fantasizing about recognition and redemption (and love). Both seem padded, though the four fictions only fill 134 smallish pages.

The book recalls (on the basis of the author's journals) sexual encounters with black men: twenty from 1978-80, another seven from 2002-03. The first set is a mix of relationships of some duration and "tricks;" the second set mostly portrays single encounters. The stories are sexually graphic. I would say that there are not "about sex," but about trying to understand some men, including the author, through sexual encounters (how they connected and disconnected in a more general sense than that of organs and orifices). The pleasures are most definitely "embodied," the regrets are mostly not about what the bodies did or did not do.

Adams celebrates the sexual connections across the American great divide of race that he made, varying in duration though the relationships were, during two particularly interesting epochs of modern American gay history, the pre-AIDS late-1970s and the post-everything years of the start of the third millennium.

Derived from a conference held at Tulane University on the centennial of the 1901 drag ball raided by Mexico City police, the book includes  (in both Spanish and English) a substantial part of a naturalist novel by Eduardo Castrejon, _Los 41_ that describes preparations for the ball, the ball, and the Yucatan exile of the unlucky cross-dressed males, the famous Posada cartoons, the reports from a range of newspapers, four chapters analyzing  the scandal and concerns about the compromised masculinity of the Porifirian elite, a chapter trying to impose the author's view on what the gender systems of Mexican prisons should have been (rejecting what evidence is available). a very detailed analysis of one case study of a woman incarcerated in a Mexican asylum, and an essay on the popular poet Amando Nervo's "sentimental womanliness." The last two chapters are not related to the bust of the (in)"famous 41," and the last one does not specify when Nervo wrote what Sylvia Molloy chooses to discuss. Although insightful, her chapter is unhistorical in being unmoored from dates of composition or publication.

The chapters by Robert Buffington on the denigration of the elite's masculinity in newspapers aimed at the Mexican working class and by Victor Macias-Gonzales on the quest of the would-be fashionable to look whiter (i.e., less Indian, more Parisian) are focused on general cultural conceptions rather than on chronological developments, but provide dates for the reader (Buffington being more compunctious about this). Both chapters include reproductions of cartoons and advertisements from Mexican publications of the era. Their authors and the authors of the two chapters discussing the scandal and its published representations (Carlos Monsivais and Robert Irwin) are also sensitive to and insightful about the class and racial/ethnic dynamics, placing the bust of the 41 in the context of undercutting the legitimacy of the unmanly, Francophilic,_refinadito_ (hyper-refined)  elite.

Although I'd have wished for systematic comparison to other homosexual "scandals" of the late-19th and early-20th centuries (and, like the authors, to know what those swept up for breaking no laws thought of their treatment and press coverage of the ball and raid), there is a great deal of fascinating early-20th-century material and of stimulating early-21st-century analysis in this volume.

How the great director William Wyler could have made a 212-minute movie that is both visually and emotionally uninvolving is a mystery. Another is the cascade of Oscars it received - especially one to Charlton Heston for smouldering (considering that alternatives that year included Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot," Cary Grant in "North by Northwest," and James Stewart in "Anatomy of a Murder"). This is not even one of Heston's best films.

The women's parts are not large, but entirely devoid of characterization.

Stephen Boyd is somewhat more interesting in it that Heston or the ultra-bland women, and Hugh Griffith enlivens things for a few minutes. The galley-rescue-adoption middle is ludicrous, the music for Jesus's appearances is overwrought to the point of parody. Even the chariot race is overlong (not to mention that the movie goes on for another 45+ minutes after that climax).

DUPLICITY is the kind of mystery novel that might have resulted from a collaboration between E. L. Doctorow, Stephen King, and Charles Bukowski-with a bit too much King and not enough Doctorow for my own tastes.

The book is easier to surrender to if one believes some psychics are legitimate and in ghostly possession, but I was able to enjoy it as a story about someone who works with psychics he believes provide him at least clues (and who doesn't believe in ghosts). Carlos, the "psychic detective" narrating his investigation into a long-ago disappearance does not claim to have psychic powers and acknowledges that most psychics are fakes, but has consistently gained insights from a few. The three he involves in his quest for New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, who disappeared during the 1930s, are the novel's most interesting characters.

The novel is a page-turner and fits into the detective genre in having a knight-errant drop-out from the conventional world glimpsing a lot of official corruption. The voice of the 1930s judge does not ring quite true to me, but my primary frustration is with Carlos's motivation to stir this particular congealed murk and the puzzling lack of following through to the fruits of his search.

_Prose's slim but not slight book is filled with insights and evocative appreciation of the often-invaded island of Sicily and its hybrid art and cuisine. Her book provides a good introduction to Sicily, and also provides many interesting reflections for those who have visited the island and are familiar with the literature about it.

_Sicilian Odyssey_ lacks the familiarity based on long-time residence underlying Peter Robb's involuted and near-desparing _Midnight in Sicily_ , Daphne Phelps's The Most Beautiful House in Sicily, or Mary Taylor Simeti's _On Persephone's Island_. Prose's travel book is better informed than Lawrence Durrell's entertaining _Sicilian Carousel_, but there are not any characters as vivid in Prose's book as some in the other books I've mentioned.

She writes acutely about food (rightly summing up that "if freshness [of ingredients] is the hallmark of Sicilian cuisine, subtlety is not").and art and architecture, with insightful bits of appreciation of Sicilian writers and photographers and of what Caravaggio did while on Sicily. Also, her photographs (reproduced in black-and-white) are sharp and well illustrate some of the points in her text.

The book contains many incisive quotations from gay Harlemites who consider themselves black first and gay second, and whose social and sexual networks are black. The research was done in the late 1980s for a Columbia anthropology Ph.D. The author, a white New Zealander, died in 1992, and it took a more years for the book to reach print.

Hawkeswood was so intent on challenging the focus on black male irresponsibility (and pathology), that he claims no one else studied middle-class blacks (ignoring SLIM'S TABLE, BLACK BOURGEOIS, etc.). On his way to providing an antithesis of the studies of junkies and slackers, he comes across as a Candide (or Pangloss), downplaying homophobia and "fagbashing" in Harlem and making his informants come across as almost saintly in their devotion to their churches, natal families, and social networks. Hawkeswood gathered some interesting material, and the social science literature IS slanted toward black ne're-do-wells, but is the solution "politically correct" bias in the other direction?

The writing and reasoning in this history of the medieval formation of Christian condemnation of the "nefarious sin" of "sodomy" are very crisp. My only complaint is that the book is too short (not examining the condemnation of "sodomites" in the first Christian millennium, or in Jewish or Islamic theology).

Jordan shows how one after another Church Father produced incoherent condemnations of sodomy--monastic, clerical, and layman--in part out of concern for suggesting such a sin to those not aware of its possibility, in part not wanting to reveal the extent of its prevalence within the priesthood and monasteries. One striking feature is that this tradition/discourse only began more than a thousand years after Christ, who is not recorded as having condemned sodomy or sodomites.

Foreign-born physicians, especially South Asian ones such as the author of this remarkable memoir, frequently are perceived as even more arrogant, distant, and smug about their high status and income in rural areas than are urban, American-born ones. Verghese, who grew up in Ethiopia and who finished medical school in his (Christian) parents' homeland of India, clearly describes the allocation of medical personnel in the US. He also understands the resentments by those of old stock, poor white patient of affluent foreign-born doctors. As the title indicates, Verghese wanted to feel at home where he chose to settle, to provide his sons a sense of belonging in one place, a sense that he had not had in his own peripatetic life. Like his patients, however, he was never certain that seeming acceptance was was more than provisional.

This insightful, lyrical, and moving book provides a vivid account of being an alien doctor in rural America dealing with a terrifying disease that was (and is) also perceived as alien, as something that, in the view of many, other kinds of people contract and probably deserve. Acute analyses of American (including Asian-American) arrangements and assumptions underlie a poignant narrative of AIDS coming to the northeastern Tennessee hills. Verghese shares Oliver Sacks's ability to engage readers in the horror and the mystery of sufferings for which physicians have no magic bullets. As Paul Farmer, another physician who made a difference, showed in _AIDS and Accusation_, how a society responds to AIDS illuminates much about the society, not only how medical services are organized and financed in it. Verghese shows strengths as well as weaknesses in rural Southeastern American backwaters. He also illuminates connections from such seemingly isolated places to the larger society and ties of blood to distant urban centers where gay men sought refuge.