A touching, playful tribute to a vaudeville giant—and so much more.
Just about every aspect of Canadian independent filmmaker and animator Fleming’s first foray into graphic literature dazzles like a Broadway marquee.
Using as a springboard for this illustrated memoir her award-winning 2003 documentary film of the same title, Fleming tells the amazing, forgotten story of her great-grandfather, Long Tack Sam (1895–1961). He was one of the 20th century’s most famous magicians, playing the Palace Theatre, Broadway’s top vaudeville house, more often even than Houdini. The rise to popular glory of a small acrobat from a village in China offers his great-granddaughter an opportunity for her own journey of self-discovery. Just as Sam’s variety show captivated audiences from Shanghai to New Zealand and New York, Fleming aims here to enchant both young and old with a fascinating scrapbook-style narrative. It’s vividly illustrated and quite moving, particularly the portrait of transcontinental love between Sam and Austrian shopgirl Leopoldine Roesler, who married in 1908. What really distinguishes the work, however, is its collage-like, collaborative form. Fleming underscores her belief that “it’s hard to know what is true” by including the different versions of Sam’s history she encountered in various sources; she chose to have these multiple possibilities illustrated by Julian Lawrence in the ravishing style of a 1930s comic. Gently connecting the dots among episodes in Sam’s life, offering captions for the photos and for the found objects from his career, is “Stickgirl,” a charming persona drawn by Fleming herself. She narrates the work as a friend sitting next to you on the couch might annotate the pages of a family photo album, an approach that creates great intimacy. Meanwhile, a timeline of important 20th-century events runs alongside the personal narrative, illustrating how daily life is subject to world affairs.
A touching, playful tribute to a vaudeville giant—and so much more.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-264-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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