by Ruth Brandon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1994
Houdini's fame is so great that he is more a metaphor for magical escape than a man, but Brandon's (The New Women and the Old Men, 1990) biography readably explores both his act's archetypal appeal and his obsessive personality. Born Ehrich Weiss in Hungary and raised in Wisconsin, Houdini mythologized his impoverished childhood and early career in countless interviews and publicity notices. Brandon penetrates his family's isolation in poverty, his father's failure as a rabbi in America, and his mother's Freudian bond with her favorite son. Married early, Houdini and his assistant-wife began with an unremarkable magic act, which they toured in circuses, vaudeville, and even a freak show. At the turn of the century his theatrical breakthrough came with concentrating and expanding on his original escape act—from handcuffs—and his promotional talents and showmanship brought him worldwide fame, with phenomenal success in autocratic Germany and Russia. He added constantly to his ingenious repertoire—escaping from straitjackets, immersed in water, suspended in midair, or buried alive—with an instinctual sense of the public appetite, while also writing books and dabbling in early movies and aviation. Preoccupied with spiritualism, he campaigned against fraudulent mediums and arranged experiments to make contact with his wife after his death. Invoking Freud and Jung, Brandon reveals Houdini's fixations on his mother (including impotence, in her guess), suicide, death, and the hereafter, and his act's fascination for his audience (though she ignores his influence on modern magicians like Penn and Teller). If her Houdini is shackled in Freudian complexes, though, his act was equally bound up in his obsessions. More trickily, Brandon adroitly deconstructs his secrets (available for years) but keeps the suspense and wonder intact. Apart from occasional slips into a corny carny-huckster style and insertions of irrelevant anecdotes of her own experiences, Brandon has written an entertaining biography of a legendary figure. (24 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42437-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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SEEN & HEARD
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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