Despite the inherent tension in the world of the circus and the whiff of glamour surrounding the circus queen, her story...
A story of circus fame and all its accompanying troubles from the years when the “greatest show on Earth” was at its glamorous best.
Art dealer and former Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel art critic Jensen (The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins, 2006, etc.) sets out to explain why his subject, Lillian Leitzel (1891–1931), was so beloved in her time. Born into a circus family and trained from an early age on the trapeze and rings, her talent was clearly special. She moved easily from a family show to her own success and fame, and Jensen documents the entire road. The author provides an adequate biography, but he doesn’t make it obvious why readers today should care. His initial descriptions of her aerial abilities and parentage are arresting, but as the narrative progresses, it starts to feel stale. Leitzel’s signature move may have been amazing to behold, but words can only go so far in describing the visual wonder. Despite Jensen’s constant reminders about her salary, her living arrangements and her diva style, it is easy to overlook why she was crowned as performing royalty. Interwoven with Leitzel’s take of fame is the love story between Leitzel and Alfredo Codona, a trapeze artist. Fraught with the obstacles of chaperones, spouses and danger, the story of the affair is full of intrigue. The community, dedication and the transient nature of the circus are a fantastic backdrop for the action, but those looking for a broader exploration of the entire community should look elsewhere. This book revolves around Leitzel and Alfredo.
Despite the inherent tension in the world of the circus and the whiff of glamour surrounding the circus queen, her story will appeal mostly to true circus enthusiasts.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-98656-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
PROFILES
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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