A deeply informed history as vigorous as Wagner’s music.
A wide-ranging, erudite examination of how Richard Wagner’s influence has extended far beyond the opera house.
Award-winning New Yorker music critic Ross places Wagner (1813-1883) at the center of a capacious, fascinating history of Western culture. Focused on Wagner’s reception by novelists, poets, artists—and Hitler—the author argues compellingly that the “staggeringly energetic” Wagner loomed as “the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900”—and endures still. As Nietzsche proclaimed about the man with whom he had a tense, complicated relationship, “Wagner sums up modernity.” Drawing on a prodigious number of sources, Ross examines Wagner’s influence on the famous—Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cezanne, Gauguin, T.S. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, and Lawrence, among many other modernists—and infamous: Otto Weininger, whose anti-Semitic writings rival Wagner’s in virulence; and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British botanist and “German racial ideologue” who served as “the bridge between Bayreuth and Nazi Germany.” Ross probes Wagner’s attraction to Jews (Zionist Theodor Herzl, for example), Blacks (including W.E.B. Du Bois), feminists, and homosexuals despite Wagner’s professed bigotry and racism. Across Europe and in the U.S., Wagner became a cult figure: “a torchbearer of the modern” for the French; “a messenger of Arthuriana” in Britain. For Americans, “Wagner harmonized with a national love of wilderness sagas, frontier lore, Native American tales, stories of desperadoes searching for gold.” Lohengrin is a staple of weddings, and from The Birth of a Nation onward, Wagner’s music has been the soundtrack of more than 1,000 films, which have used his work “to unleash all manner of rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers.” The author asks: “In the face of a sacred monster like Wagner, what power do spectators have? Are we necessarily subject to the domination of his works, complicit in their ideology? Or, in embracing them, can we take possession of them and remake them in our own image? One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A deeply informed history as vigorous as Wagner’s music.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28593-7
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Dillard’s story reflects maturity and understanding from someone who was forced to mature and understand too much too soon.
A measured memoir from a daughter of the famous family.
Growing up in the Institute of Basic Life Principles community, which she came to realize was “a cult, thriving on a culture of fear and manipulation,” Duggar and her 18 siblings were raised never to question parental authority. As the author recalls, she felt no need to, describing the loving home of her girlhood. When a documentary crew approached her father, Jim Bob, and proposed first a series of TV specials that would be called 17 Kids and Counting (later 18 and 19 Kids and Counting), he agreed, telling his family that this was a chance to share their conservative Christian faith. It was also a chance to become wealthy, but Jill, who was dedicated to following the rules, didn’t question where the money went. A key to her falling out with her family was orchestrated by Jim Bob, who introduced her to missionary Derick Dillard. Their wedding was one of the most-watched episodes of the series. Even though she was an adult, Jill’s parents and the show continued to expect more of the young couple. When they attempted to say no to filming some aspects of their lives, Jill discovered that a sheet of paper her father asked her to sign the day before her wedding was part of a contract in which she had unwittingly agreed to full cooperation. Writing about her sex offender brother, Josh, and the legal action she and Derick had to take to get their questions answered, Jill describes how she was finally able—through therapy, prayer, and the establishment of boundaries—to reconcile love for her parents with Jim Bob’s deception and reframe her faith outside the IBLP.
Dillard’s story reflects maturity and understanding from someone who was forced to mature and understand too much too soon.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781668024447
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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