Spangle often gets requests from authors to review new books. If, on occasion, those tomes have Cleveland or LGBT connections, we’ve decided to give them a once-over.

When the author of a new encyclopedia thanks Wikipedia in his acknowledgments, part of me wants to throw myself off a cliff — and the rest of me wants to take him with me over the edge.

Note to Keith Stern, author of the new Queers in History — and every student ages 5 to 95: Wikipedia is not a source for true scholarship. Period. And even if you’re just using it to fact-check, don’t mention it in your acknowledgments. If you do, your credibility is toast.

It’s one of several faults that make Queers an average read.

With just hours to go before a film festival yearlong drought, my second Saturday reviews …

Movie No. 17: The Two Horses of Genghis Khan
An exquisitely filmed story of a young woman trying to repair damage from the Chinese cultural revolution.

The woman's grandmother had a beautiful horse-head "violin"(not the kind of instrument we think of as a violin) that she was forced to destroy when the Chinese invaded Inner Mongolia. On the head of the instrument that she managed to save and pass on was engraved an additional verse of a very old song, "The Two Horses of Genghis Kahn.” This verse was only sung in Outer Mongolia. The young woman travels to Outer Mongolia to try to find the lost song and honor her grandmother's last wish to fix the violin.

Her journey is long and hard, but she finally finds an old women who, after much coaching, remembers the song. The instrument is restored and played in concert. A victory over China's insistence that the old must be destroyed before the new can be created.