GLR November-December 2025

done and be willing to play the long, tedious game. The “neces sity” piece should be a no-brainer. There is a lively humility in Schulman’s tone. She clearly knows her history and has a firm grasp on the machinations of the cultural industries in which she works, including publish ing, academia, and theater, but there is never a sense of self righteousness in her delivery. She remains modest and approachable throughout, even understanding and beseeching. She wants us to wake up and turn a jaundiced eye on not only the government but also ourselves, on the mores that fool us, manipulate us, and lead us to betray what she believes is our naturally conscientious state. “Selective recognition,” writes Schulman, “is how we maintain our own sense of goodness.” Gay men come in for criticism for their “homonationalism,” for falling in line with the U.S. government and military, and for buying into the institutions of marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing. In an exhilarating section, she reacts to the tired refrain of anti-Palestinian critics who question why a ho mosexual would defend a people that would just as soon see them dead for their sexuality. Schulman coolly rebuffs the vap idity of this question by providing a list of queer Muslim and specifically Palestinian organizations that have pushed for LGBT rights throughout the Arab world. She also addresses the gross overgeneralization of the claim itself, jokingly asking if we should also attack Florida and other U.S. states for holding similarly murderous homophobic sentiments. She further re minds these critics that Christian and Jewish orthodoxies would also prefer to see homosexuality obliterated, often through vio lent means. Her most potent pushback comes in the form of a big humanistic “So what?” Just because a group of people does

n’t believe in my right to exist because of my sexual orienta tion doesn’t mean they should be killed. Schulman reveals that she was the target of a smear campaign leveled by the Zionist Organization of America in which she was labeled a terrorist, a friend of Hamas, and a proponent of anti semitism at the City University of New York, where she taught. The accusations soon gave way to harassment of not just Schul man but also her friends and colleagues. The experience nearly led to her termination from the college. She offers several case studies that humanize her arguments. Among them is Jean Genet for his solidarity with Palestine and the Black Panther Party. She observes that Genet had been on either side of oppression and domination “and from this complexity, his solidarity impulses sprang.” She also questions his motives, wondering if he cham pioned these causes out of a narcissistic savior complex and queer fetishization or if he found true identification with them. Schul man says it doesn’t matter, as the altruistic actions are what’s use ful and what serves the oppressed in the end. Schulman ends with the transcription of a 2010 panel dis cussion about the suicide of one of her close trans friends, which occasioned a probing examination of how institutions can crush a person’s soul, prompting them to implode and hurt those clos est to them rather than the insidious systems that torment them. The language itself provides succor. Schulman is a master at communicating on abstract concepts, making them palpable, and applying them to the willfully neglected moral challenges of everyday life. “I learned from the oppressed, not the power ful, about how to define life,” she writes early in the book, and later adds: “When we become used to the lullaby of lies, closer to-the-truth can feel unbearable.”

B R I E F S The first passenger to be described is the only one that presents a queer possibility: 21-year old Mado Pelletier, described as “stocky” and “plain,” clutches a metal lunch

Paris during the Nazi occupation, TheArt Spy explains how Valland, a curator at the Jeu de Paume museum, risked her life gath ering lists of art stolen by the Nazis from museums and private collections, especially those owned by Jewish collectors. Young details how Valland thwarted Hermann Göring’s theft of priceless art through sub terfuge and bluffs, and how the lists she gathered were used at the war’s end to find thousands of works hidden in Austrian salt mines and German castles. Valland was awarded the Légion d’hon neur and the Médaille de la Résistance by France and the Medal of Resistance by the U.S., and her resistance work has been por trayed in such films as The Train (1964) and The Monuments Men (2014). Young’s re search into her life has added an important detail to her amazing story: Valland was a lesbian who lived with her partner Joyce Heer for fifty years. When France fell and Vichy law was im posed, lesbians were considered practition ers of an “unnatural act” and were imprisoned when caught. Valland and Heer survived the war undetected, though Heer,

THE PARIS EXPRESS: A Novel by Emma Donoghue S&S/Summit Books. 288 pages, $26.99 Compared to Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room (2010), say, The Paris Express is about a more mundane reality, a regularly scheduled train run that really happened in October 1895. The trip’s conclusion, how ever, was anything but ordinary. Arriving at Montparnasse Station in Paris, the train crashed through a wall and emerged from an upper level, its locomotive coming to rest against the station at about a sixty-de gree angle. This image was so bizarre that photographic drawings were widely printed in the newspapers of the day. Amazingly, no one on the train was killed. In the absence of a natural disaster, a pre meditated crime, or a scandalous relation ship, this novel is a poignant study of a cross-section of people from different social classes in fin-de-siècle France. The journey is meticulously chronicled, beginning at 8:30 a.m. in Granville on the Normandy coast and ending at 4 p.m. in Paris. Throughout the day, characters arrive, form tentative acquaintanceships, and depart.

bucket as though it contains something valuable, as several other passengers ob serve. At first glance, she seems to be a les bian, or possibly a militant feminist. More importantly, she is a radical with a burning hatred of the bourgeois establishment, and her willingness to harm innocent bystanders in order to kill three politicians creates sus pense until a medical emergency derails her plans. Other characters appear and subplots unfold, but little does anyone imagine what fate has in store for this random group of strangers when the train’s brakes fail. J EAN R OBERTA THEARTSPY The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland by Michelle Young HarperOne. 400 pages, $29.99 The journalist Michelle Young has written a riveting biography of the most unlikely of spies, Rose Valland (1898–1980). Set in

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