Linda Hirshman's "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution" is so intent on making its argument - that the past 60 years of the LGBT rights movement has transformed America - through linguistic exuberance, enormous amounts of information and over-the-top cheerleading, that the end result is both exhilarating and more than a little exhausting.

Hirshman's scope here is broad, and she carefully charts LGBT politics from the 1950s with the emergence of the homophile movements such as Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis to the present battles over "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex marriage.

Along the way she details the histories of the early radical Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and the re-emergence of street-action politics in the late 1980s with ACT UP. This is, as Hirshman argues, one of the most compelling narratives of the fight for freedom in America and in its scope and urgency was "fueled by ... moral ambition that made it the model of a new era."

Hirshman seems to be modeling her work on Taylor Branch's three-volume history of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Like Branch, Hirshman sketches out the lives of hundreds of activists and details numerous important meetings, marches and rallies.

Knitting these together with broad swaths of often astute, sometimes repetitive, analysis, she frantically leads the reader through six decades without much breathing room. The effect is like rushing through an art museum without time to actually admire the paintings.

As an overview of recent American LGBT history, "Victory" has plenty to recommend it. Hirshman's extensive background reading and personal interviews with activists and politicians has brought together a huge amount of information, some not in other books.

She often has a great eye for the idiosyncratic, telling detail - how, in 1966, New York Mayor John Lindsay curtailed police entrapment of gay men after the accidental arrest of an unnamed heterosexual Episcopal priest who was friends with the mayor - but to a large degree Hirshman has written a top-down history that chronicles national, and important local, LGBT organizations and major political players and how they played an important part in changing legal and medical policies regarding LGBT people.

Hirshman is correct - the fight for gay freedom did revolutionize everyone's life in the United States - but the real cultural and political change came as much from the growing, open and thriving queer communities as from policymakers.

There is almost no mention here of the countless gay male and lesbian newspapers, magazines and publishing houses such as Gay Sunshine Press and Naiad Press, or recording companies such as Olivia Records. Community-based support and and gay-straight alliances in high schools and colleges, also changed America.

Hirshman's focus on mainstream politics and media is not helped by her extravagant use of superlatives that forgo delicacy of opinion and nuance, as when she describes journalist Randy Shilts as "the premier chronicler of gay life in America." She rarely misses a chance to praise physical appearances: New York 1970s activist Marty Robinson "had muscular good looks," lesbian activist and author Rita Mae Brown is "a slender brunette with killer cheekbones," and Matthew Shepard's family had "a certain Brady Bunch quality to them."

This breathlessly glitzy, pop-culture tone is curious because Hirshman - a respected professor, lawyer, writer and blogger - clearly believes deeply in the importance of her argument. Yet her tone and rhetoric often lead to misreadings.

She repeatedly refers to the "gay revolution" even as she makes it clear that the bulk of the LGBT movement was reformist, not revolutionary, in nature. Her retreat to the colloquial often undercuts the dead seriousness of her story, as when she writes, "the raiding police had some icky practices" in their treatment of transgender people caught in bar raids - when what she describes is a persistent pattern of assault and sexual humiliation.

Hirshman's snappy prose may be the very thing that makes her book a good starting point for learning about recent gay history. But the cost is a trivializing of a far more complicated past.