Gilbert Cruz: The thing I'm always trying to figure out as a cultural historian is that relationship between the works of art and the context in which they are made. You know, how do those two things really shape each other? I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review from the New York Times and today we're going to be talking about the culture wars. What are they? How did they start? Who has been on the front lines? And how long have we been fighting them? Here to answer those questions is Isaac Butler. He is a cultural historian, theater director, teacher, and author. He has written The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act, an examination of the Stannislovski Acting System and The World Only Spins Forward, a sweeping oral history about the landmark play Angels in America. His new book tackles the emergence of America's culture wars during the 1980s and 1990s. It is titled The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. And I will not use the title for the obvious pun here, but let's say it seems an appropriate moment to be talking about all of this. Isaac, thank you so much for joining us.

Isaac Butler: Thank you so much for having me, Gilbert. Yes, a convenient moment uh for us to be talking. A I don't know, resonant moment, something.

Gilbert Cruz: God, sex, art. That's a lot. You're trying to tackle a lot here. The birth of America's culture wars, however, is the thing obviously we need to start with. This is a term culture wars that gets used a lot. Um, but right as we start this conversation, I would love so that we're all on the same page. Give me a succinct definition that is going to be useful as we continue to use this phrase over this entire conversation.

Isaac Butler: Sure. The the succinct way that I would use the phrase is when cultural creations, you know, works of art, TV shows, albums, what what have you, become political issues in and of themselves.

Isaac Butler: Um, a very clear example from the era of my book that, you know, middle-aged people like me will remember very well is the two live crew album, As Nasty as They Want to Be, right? which was eventually the subject of an obscenity trial and all sorts of things. But even before that, this is a thing that's being debated by politicians. You know, what are we going to do about this? Should this be legal? You know, so there there are those kinds of fights and because America does not have a fixed national identity in the way that like France does, right? Where there's like literally a board of venerable people who decide what is French and what is not. We don't have that in the United States. Culture wars are going to flare up all the time because you know the arts are how we decide who we are. It's it's it's that's the terrain in which you know the soul of a nation or or of a person is really explored and developed. So America is particularly prone to them.

Gilbert Cruz: So it has to be attached to a work of art or piece of

Isaac Butler: I believe. So yes.

Gilbert Cruz: So why now? You know, you wrote two books about theater and now you're you're dipping into into the world largely of art and different types of art, photography, performance art, a little bit of other stuff. But what was it about this moment that you said, "Well, I guess as stressful as it may be, this is the thing I have to dip into next."

Isaac Butler: Yeah. And and it was stressful. I'll be I'll be honest. But um this was a story that had been sort of part of my life ever since I was in high school because I grew up in Washington DC and in fact I make a couple cameo appearances in the book just talking about what it was like to live through this time. My mother was very involved in the arts in DC at the time and so was I. I was a child professional actor in DC. And so it really felt like the culture wars of the 80s and 90s that I grew up in were repeating again with many of the same forces, sometimes the same people, the same mistakes being made. And so I really wanted to tell the story of this time for its own sake because I think it's an important story. And then I also think that story has incredible resonance for today.

Gilbert Cruz: In the book you you go back a bit. You identify a specific moment in the 70s before

Isaac Butler: that laid the foundation but more specifically a playbook. Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: For the cultural wars that were to follow. Can you sort of touch on on what that was and what are the elements that were then later applied to other controversies?

Isaac Butler: Yeah. So, it'\s this really wild thing called often called the Kawa County textbook war, which makes it sound like a Ken Burns documentary. You know, it's like

Gilbert Cruz: that should be a play. Someone should write a play with that.

Isaac Butler: Dear Martha, today I go to fight in the textbook wars. You know, it sort of has that that feeling in it. Basically, what happened and this will sound very familiar to people today, right? Is that a school board was going to approve a new curriculum. So, you know, hundreds of books, thousands of pieces of educational material.

Gilbert Cruz: And what state was this in, by the way?

Isaac Butler: West Virginia. In Canawa County, West Virginia to bring the county's curriculum in line with a state regulation that said, "Hey, you got to diversify your curriculum." Basically, right? You know, meeting the students where they are, helping them use the materials of their own life to connect to the the stories and whatnot. There was one member of the school board who was an evangelical Christian, the wife of a minister, a former minister, and she had gotten elected specifically on an anti-sexed platform, and she led this fight against adopting the curriculum that I think even she would say rapidly spun out of control. Right? So, it started with, hey, let's delay these books. And, you know, months later, thousands of minors are going on wildcat strikes. every grocery store in the county is closed down. People are shooting at cars. I mean, it really schools get bombed. I mean, it really spirals out of control. Um, and it's a fascinating, fascinating story in its own right. Why I was interested in it is it brings together a lot of the players that are going to show up later in the book. Um, various evangelical leaders, the Heritage Foundation goes down there, which is a new organization at this point, uh, to help out. And there is this playbook that has to do with using selective and sometimes completely dishonest quotations from larger works to inflame an audience, hyping up, I would say, exaggerated sense of grievance and persecution often from actually quite powerful people, you know, and then um capturing the supposedly mostly nonpartisan expert boards that are supposed to be making these kinds of decisions in our society, capturing them so that they can then advance your ideology. You know, it's moves like that which really find their apotheiois in the second Trump administration. I think that's pretty clear. And then on the left side, you know, we often try this playbook of like, well, let's just give them what a a little bit of what they want and then they'll go away. And that is a mistake that recurs throughout the story of my book and it's a mistake that's recurred throughout this second Trump administration because it turns out when you do that what you actually do is empower them to ask for more.

Gilbert Cruz: You really dig deep on the way in which after this sort of precursor happens.

Isaac Butler: Yeah. you know, we go to the the late 80s and early 90s, and there's an organization that at the time, I didn't realize this, at the time was still fairly young, had become sort of the the the center of so many fights over arts and arts funding and the appropriateness of using taxpayer dollars for this and that. And that is the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gilbert Cruz: Tell me about the NEA, which honestly I just I thought it had been around for so long.

Isaac Butler: No, it's only 1965.

Gilbert Cruz: I had I didn't realize why. What was it? Why did it start? And then what was the reason that this fairly,

Isaac Butler: you know, in my opinion at least seeing it described, you know, like pretty anodized governmental organization all of a sudden became the center, the hot center of all this. So the National Endowment for the Arts is really a great society program. It's launched in 1965. It's not the first time the government tries funding the arts, but they try to do it differently for a bunch of different reasons. And I will just say right now, I think the National Endowment for the Arts in its original form for those first uh 25 years is really the best of what the federal government can do. It had a tiny budget, but it it had an enormous enormous impact. So part of what's going on is after World War II, America is one of the two superpowers on earth. They have this idea as almost every, you know, if you even go back to the colonial period or the Renaissance or whatever, every country that's like steps up to the plate and is like we run the show now, they start massively investing in the arts. They do that to help create a national identity. They do that to create something for posterity, for the history books. They do that as kind of not propaganda but a sort of advertisement for their way of life, you know, etc., etc., and so forth. And we were doing the same thing, but importantly, we were doing the same thing in the shadow of the Cold War. So, the Soviets directly fund and directly control the expression of their artists. And we wanted to get as far away from that. And that we pioneered this model that's really brilliant that's often called the arms length model or the hands-off model which is that the NEA sets the categories of things that you can apply for but it does not choose the winners. The winners are chosen by civilian peerreview panels that the endowment organizes and those panels then make those choices. And those panels are made up, you know, in the visual arts it might be some curators, some fellow artists, a major funer, you know,

Gilbert Cruz: and when you say winners, you're saying grant money.

Isaac Butler: Grant money. You're winning grants that can be

Gilbert Cruz: Yep.

Gilbert Cruz: relatively small but big for you as a working artist.

Isaac Butler: Correct. And the NEA really helps create the 20th century in art. Like we talk about it as the American century in art. And that is a lot of that's due to the NEA. I mean, if I had it handy, I could read the hundreds of visual artists they sponsored. They really helped create the national dance movement of the second half of the 20th century. The regional theater movement really wouldn't exist in its present form without the National Endowment for the Arts. number of symphony orchestras, you know, just like exponentially multiplies, etc. They are funding a lot of traditional stuff, Shakespeare and schools, folk art preservation, all that stuff. But they're also funding like really bleeding edge artists. Um, and it's really the only place in the federal government where both people of color and LGBTQ Americans have a power base. And you can see why that's anathema to the right and especially the Christian right. Um, and then when government money starts going to art that the religious right is offended by, they see an opening to attack and to build power within the Republican party. Coming up, Isaac talks about the art that was at the center of the culture wars and what these very public fights meant for the actual artists. So Isaac, you briefly reflect on the fact that for a very long time there was an implicit understanding in America that art and politics maybe were separate things and one of the things as you say that defined the culture wars that defined this period was the uh the smashing together of these two things.

Gilbert Cruz: Yes. All of a sudden, culture becomes a central focus in political debate. You start in the book by talking about the controversy around Martin Scorsesi's film, The Last Temptation of Christ. Activists are calling it blasphemous. They're trying to get it pulled from theaters. But then it all moves over into the world of fine art. Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: Performance art. And I didn't realize this until I read your book that so many of these fights were over photography. Yeah. There's Andre Serrano. He's famous for photographing a crucifix submerged in his own urine. There's Robert Maplethorp with his sexually explicit images. And then you had David Venerovich who actually sues after a conservative religious group crops his work to make it appear

Gilbert Cruz: I wonder if you could tell me what were some of the tactics that people like Jesse Helms, a longtime Republican senator from North Carolina

Isaac Butler: and all the organizations that were opposed to funding this kind of art, what what were they doing? How were they getting their supporters and other people riled up about what they didn't want in museums? Well, one of the great ironies is one of the main ways they were doing it was by distributing these images to all of their followers to piss them off, right? Like Jesse Helms and there's a guy named Donald Wildman who runs this group, the American Family Association. You know, they are unbelievably major distribution vectors of the very images that they're trying to fight. You know, there's a couple

Gilbert Cruz: because the internet didn't exist. You couldn't see these images if you did not actually go to the museum.

Isaac Butler: Yes. I mean, one of the things my book is really about is pre-in political organizing, right? And it's it's really fascinating because the the big thing that the right really pioneered, figured out, innovated on, and the the left never caught up to them was direct mail appeals. And what Donald Wildman is doing is he's taking the worst examples he can find and sometimes maybe making up some examples and he's, you know, xeroxing them and mimographing them and putting them in an envelope. And they promised people that if they didn't fight back against this, literally one of the letters says physical persecution of Christians won't be far behind.

Gilbert Cruz: Mhm. Well, I'm curious. You know, these campaigns really escalate. They set off changes in Congress, as you write a bunch about, things go all the way to the Supreme Court when a group of performance artists that eventually become known as the NEA4, get their funding vetoed and they sue. So, just what was it like for them? What was it like for these artists, other artists? What's the effect on their ability to work, their reputations? You know, there's some debate about this because I think we have this assumption that all press is good press and once you're the subject of a controversy, it's good for your career.

Isaac Butler: Everyone I talked to, with the exception of Andre Serrano, disputed this. Andre Serrano is absolutely like Jesse Helms gave me my career. I wrote him a thank you letter in 2000 about it, right? You know, um uh uh he's very open about that. But if you read the memoirs by the four performance artists who came to be known as the NEA4, they were like, you know, my artistic homes couldn't book me because it was too dangerous. They had to hire extra security. I got death threats. You know, no one could see my work for what it was. They were just looking for the controversial thing. There's a lot of pain around that. There's a lot of fighting back against shame, against, you know, trying to find pride in your work again. and just it's exhausting to be under siege like that all the time and trying to create your art. So for the individual artists who were swept up in this, it was very very difficult. David Venerovich was dying of AIDS for much of the time that he was dealing with this. And there were many people I spoke to who were like I just kept telling him like just take care of your health. Why are you worrying about this? Like there's nothing you can do about it. Please take care of yourself. and he just wouldn't do that because he wanted to fight back. For the rest of the arts field, I think it unquestionably had a chilling effect. Congress passes a bunch of rules. Basically, the the main one is called the decency clause to try to hem in what the NEA will fund. And once that happens, if Gilbert, if you were the curator of the Cruz Museum, you know, and uh

Gilbert Cruz: you sure am.

Isaac Butler: Yep. you can only apply to the NEA for one grant, you know, a year, you're going to apply for the least offensive show you're doing. So that gives those things an edge in the marketplace of ideas. And so you really really see many people would say to to journalists even at the time like I'm not going to program this stuff right now. So the chilling effect on the field was real.

Gilbert Cruz: You have a very personal connection to art.

Isaac Butler: Yes.

Gilbert Cruz: to theater to all this stuff. You touched on it.

Gilbert Cruz: You touch on it in the book.

Gilbert Cruz: You were a professional theater actor in DC where you live starting at the age of 12.

Gilbert Cruz: And I'm wondering between that and your mother being on various boards sort of like family connections to various art institutions. H how you think that has that has affected the way that you think about all this? It really seems like this is sort of this is at the fiery core of who who Isaac Butler is.

Isaac Butler: I don't know who I would be without the arts being the the core of who I am. It happened so early. You know, I loved art of all kinds from such an early age. You know, my first Philip Glass opera in fourth grade. That's high art. But then there's also TV and movies. You know, like I remember seeing Fantasia at the Uptown Theater in Washington DC when I was three years old. And it was really one of my foremost artgoing experiences in my entire life. Uh in part because I had a bloody nose during it and had to be carried out of the film bleeding and screaming into an around the block line of parents. But I just I can't imagine myself without it. One of the things that I tried to do in this book, and I talk about this in the introduction to the book, is like because of that and because of my own background, like I'm not going to pretend to be objective about this stuff. I think that would actually be very silly and would do me the subject matter and the reader a disservice. Instead, I'm going to, when appropriate, tell you what I really think and feel about this stuff and then try to control for my biases as much as I possibly can and be honest about that. And then the reader is free to disagree with me if they want to because one of the great things about free expression is that we can disagree about stuff and then be enriched by that disagreement. And I really truly believe in that.

Gilbert Cruz: What What do you think the role of the government should be in the arts?

Isaac Butler: Um, I think the NEA is classically constructed. The hands-off model, you know, all of that stuff was really brilliant and worked really well. And I would love to go back to that. That is not what we have right now. The the post Doge NEA has all these rules about what you can and cannot fund.

Gilbert Cruz: But why why do you, Isaac, think that this should be

Isaac Butler: Oh. Oh, why? I'm sorry. I misunderstood your question. Yeah. Well, I mean, beyond the fact that the results speak for themselves in terms of what was accomplished over the NEA's first 25 years, the truth of the matter is that I believe in a vision of American citizenship where we are more than just our capacity to make money. We're more than just our productivity. The arts are an absolutely vital component of that. You know, they are how we explore our subjectivity, our relationship to others, our history, who we want to be. And a society that does not support the arts, that does not think the arts are worth taxpayer dollars, is a society that has decided that the only value a human life has is its economic utility. And I reject that vision of America. I think it is a very narrow, very sad vision of America.

Gilbert Cruz: I want to ask you about this thing that you just mentioned, you know, sort of trying to account for and you know, solve for your biases, but also just saying in the book, this is who I am, this is what I believe. You wrote recently on your Substack something about what it means to write a a book like this. You said, quote, I want to reiterate the job of the historian is to illuminate the past. It is not to create an extended analogy by which you can convince people to agree with your politics. So there's this way in which writing a piece of history about a highly controversial political topic where your beliefs are clear is a bit of a tightrope.

Isaac Butler: That that came from, you know, just my own reading that during the Trump admin both Trump administrations, there were a lot of works of purported history that were really overly determined by the writer's desire to comment on the present day. You know, that's not actually what I'm doing. I'm writing about this thing in the 80s and '9s that I think lays the groundwork for a lot. And I think there are clear resonances and lessons. But I'm not writing an allegory. If I wanted to write about Trump, I would write a book about Trump. You know? And so I think it's important to respect the integrity of the past, to let it be what it was, and not to force it into a mold to serve your own political argument. And that is a discipline. It's a real discipline because you get angry. You look at these historical actors, you look at Jesse Helms, you look at Donald Wildmon, and you get mad. And you want to just write a polemic. But a polemic is not history. History is more complicated than that. It's more human than that.

Gilbert Cruz: This is your third book, one of them, as you know, you co-wrote Dan Kois. Is there something you're trying to figure out about art and America through these three books?

Isaac Butler: Well, my my best friend since the third grade broke me and he said, "All three of your books are actually about you in high school, aren't they?" And he wasn't wrong. You know, uh I saw Angels in America my freshman year of high school. That led to The World Only Spins Forward. I became obsessed with Method Acting in high school. That led to The Method. And then this book is about the culture wars that I lived through and watched on TV and in museums when I was in high school. So there's this way in which I am just continually trying to unpack my own adolescence. But on a broader level, I think I am trying to figure out how art functions in our society, why we care about it so much, and why it has this power to provoke such intense, sometimes violent reactions. It's about that connection between the art and the culture, the way they shape each other.

Gilbert Cruz: we can we cannot escape our youth.

Isaac Butler: We can't escape our youth. I mean, all writing is is autobiography, right, Gilbert? And so um so there's that aspect of it.

Gilbert Cruz: no, that sounds that sounds very boring to me.

Isaac Butler: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so I don't know that every one of my books is going to be doing that for the rest of my life. Um but at the moment, it seems to be the pattern.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. So, By the Book, Isaac Butler, I have several questions for you. Are you ready?

Isaac Butler: I'm ready.

Gilbert Cruz: Okay. Are these Yeah, I've got my buzzer. No.

Gilbert Cruz: You You have written, thought, and podcasted and talked so much about Shakespeare and politics. So, what is your favorite Shakespeare play?

Isaac Butler: This is an impossible question, right?

Gilbert Cruz: It's not impossible because I just asked it.

Isaac Butler: Um, there is a stable top tier of Shakespeare plays that almost everyone agrees on and that's love. The top five is Hamlet, 12th Night, King Lear, Henry IVth, Part One, and A Fifth Play of Your Choosing. Right? So, I'm going to set those aside because otherwise it's like a oh, Revolver is the best Beatles album, right? It's like whom? Come on. And so, I want to talk about one of the plays that is not in that top tier but that I think is absolutely brilliant. And that's Measure for Measure.

Isaac Butler: Measure for Measure is a brilliant play. It's one of the plays where actually, because I teach it, so I can I can tell you this. Um, even if you don't have a lot of Shakespeare knowledge, it's actually a very crystal clear on the page play. It's a play about sexual politics. It's a play about the hypocrisies of Puritanism. It's a play about uh gender and sex. It has the greatest but longest scene in all of Shakespeare, which is the scene between Isabella and Angelo in Act Two. It's just a masterpiece. It's a problem play, which means it doesn't fit neatly into comedy or tragedy. And that's what makes it so fascinating.

Gilbert Cruz: That's incredible. Uh what a great answer. Um next question. What are some of your favorite books that explore the intersection of of art and politics?

Isaac Butler: Yeah. So, one of them I want to go to bath for because it's um it's out of print and I think someone should bring it back into print. So, it's by a a writer named Anthony Julius and it's called Transgressions, the Offenses of Art. And it is a history of transgressive art, why it works, why it doesn't, and how it relates to the state and public taste. It's a beautiful, beautiful, very smart book. Another one is Jack Lowery's recent book, It Was Lifesaving, which is about the history of Grand Fury, the art collective within ACT UP. I don't know if you've read that.

Gilbert Cruz: I have not.

Isaac Butler: It's a beautiful beautiful book about telling the story of Grand Fury. Grand Fury was kind of the most prominent of the art collectives within ACT UP. They uh developed a lot of the t-shirts and slogans like um all people with AIDS are innocent and it's about the history of that collective. Jack Larry interviewed like everyone who's still alive. He interviewed them. He went to tons of private paper collections. It is just a beautiful, beautifully told history. And it's a great example of art that was actually effective politically, not just commenting on it, but actually changing things.

Gilbert Cruz: You can name one more.

Isaac Butler: Okay, I'm going to go uh let's go James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work,

Isaac Butler: his book of film criticism, which is also a memoir, which is also a great political treatise. you know, when he's writing that, people aren't really writing the kind of film criticism that is doing social critique and autobiography and film criticism at the same time. Now, it feels like we all do it all the time, right? But he's really the pioneer, and it's great to go back to those kind of pioneering works.

Gilbert Cruz: That is a great one. I'm glad we allowed you that that third option there.

Isaac Butler: Thank you.

Gilbert Cruz: Next question. Is there a biography of an artist or a memoir or autobiography that has really stuck with you?

Isaac Butler: Fire in the Belly, which is C. Car's biography of David Voyerovich is essential reading. I mean everything See Carc writes is essential reading. I love Secar's work. Um absolutely incredible. We would not understand the 80s and 90s in art without her columns for the village voice in her books. So Fire in the Belly is incredible. But the greatest I think artist memoir of all time might be Elia Kazan's a life which is you know it's like reading parad it's like the paradise lost of showbiz autobiographies. On the first page, he says, "I am the devil, and you cannot trust anything I say." And then for 800 pages, just digs into the most salacious, darkest parts of himself and puts them on the page. It's funny. It's outrageous. It's offensive at times. It It illuminates a whole history of art. It's just It's incredible. It's so incredible. Uh it might be the most honest and dishonest at the same time book ever written.

Gilbert Cruz: I love it. That sounds awesome. And you almost sold me, but then you said it was 800 pages. So, uh

Isaac Butler: I know. I know.

Gilbert Cruz: But it's amazing.

Isaac Butler: It flies by. Look, when you get to his Affair with Marilyn Monroe, you're just like the pages are just, you know, turning into flames as you flip them so quickly.

Gilbert Cruz: What um are there books that you find yourself returning to over and over again?

Isaac Butler: There's always so many to read, so I always feel guilty when I reread. um the great Alisa Gabbart who writes uh the poetry column for your section um in her book Any Person is the Only Self, she has this quote that says uh some people say rereading is the only reading, but sometimes I think first readings are the only rereadings. And I love that because it's a great apherism. It's almost like a Zen Cohen and also it gets me out of the pressure to reread because I have so many books I want to read. There's no way I'll get to all of them before I die.

Gilbert Cruz: Yeah, the struggle is real. I know precisely what you're talking about. What is the latest non-fiction book that you really enjoyed?

Isaac Butler: Uh, I'm going to say Richard Kitner's Fear No Pharaoh, American Jews, the Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery. And it's really about the variety of Jewish experience in terms of the slavery question. you know, um, you know, he's not there's lots of Jews. I think we like to have a somewhat flattering opinion of ourselves uh in the civil rights movement and the sla and and slavery, but lots of Jews involved in the slave trade. You know, the first synagogue in America was built by enslaved people. So, it it's both a history of Jews in the United States and a history of the institution of slavery and a history of how those things meld together all in one. I sort of don't know how he did it because it moves very quickly and it's it's really beautifully told. Is there a book that's just reliable to give as a gift? You'll always fall back on. I love this book. I love giving it to people.

Gilbert Cruz: One that I've had really good luck with is this book that New York Review of Books Editions put out uh reissued called The Kindness of Strangers by Sula Vertell and it's a memoir. She's a Polish Jewish stage actress who eventually makes her way to Vienna and she's a big actress in the vianese stage and then she flees and comes to California along with you know many of the other Jewish intelligencia where she becomes Greta Garbo's best friend and go-to screenwriter and maybe lover although that's not discussed in the memoir. She has this German Jewish husband. They have this very open bohemian relationship and her house becomes the center of German intellectual exile life in Los Angeles. So you know like Thomas man's birthday is at her house. You know all the people in the film industry are there and so she just led this really extraordinary life and the way she talks about it is really beautiful and fun.

Gilbert Cruz: That sounds fascinating. I have the last one. Isaac Butler,

Gilbert Cruz: what are a couple books that are on your nightstand? Real or metaphorical nightstand? Well, I should send you a photo of my nightstand because my my New Year's resolution this year is to default to books that I owned prior to New Year's because I have so many that I have accumulated over decades that I have not read. And it's sort of like that scene in High Fidelity where he's reorganizing his his records autobiographically, you know. Um, so, you know, there's books on my nightstand that I got in college and was supposed to read and didn't, but I've always wanted to read, you know. So, I have just tons of them. So, how many do you want? I I made a list.

Gilbert Cruz: Give me two. Give me two.

Isaac Butler: Give you two. Okay. I'm going to give you two. The the literal first two I found this morning when I looked. Uh, The Talmud, a biography by Barry Scott Whimfimer, which is literally like a biography of the like how was the Talmud written and stuff like that. Um, and my last sigh, which is the memoir by uh Lewis Bunwell.

Gilbert Cruz: Good lord. The the range of books that you just recommended was,

Gilbert Cruz: you know, the thing is is that

Isaac Butler: superb. I think the thing that works for me because I have a lot of different interests is synthesis. Like I think that's one of the things that really draws me to certain subjects and that I'm good at on the page. And so I've decided to use the fact that I'm a magpie to my own advantage.

Gilbert Cruz: Extremely impressive. Isaac Butler, author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. Thank you so much for joining the book review.

Isaac Butler: Thank you, Gilbert.

Gilbert Cruz: The book review is produced by Sarah Diamond, Amy Pearl, and Patricia Suladan. It's edited by Tracy Mumford, and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Etup. Special thanks to Dalia Hadad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email at the bookreview@ny times.com. I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.