They just don't make characters like this anymore. Kudos to Prioleau for her gallant historical rescue mission.
An outsize, obnoxious, 19th-century self-made millionaire is restored to her rightful place.
Born to a family of "bounders and bankrupts" in New Orleans, her unknown biological mother likely Black, though her biraciality was never acknowledged, Miriam Florence Squier Leslie (1836-1914) clawed her way up the social structure to become an important figure in publishing, managing several magazines she inherited from her third husband, Frank Leslie. She also wrote essays and books. As Prioleau makes clear, class divisions in America were extreme during Leslie's lifetime, which encompassed the Haymarket Riots, the Johnstown flood, and the Great Depression. Yet by deploying her inimitable blend of intellect, drive, greed, sex appeal, deceit, and inferiority complex–fueled snobbery, Leslie leapt the chasm between poor and rich and amassed a huge fortune, largely spent on Gilded Age excess in lodgings, attire, and hospitality. No matter what she did—and she did plenty—this world-class striver was never embraced by the upper crust. She avoided philanthropy, preferring to revile rather than lend a hand to the poor. Yet in a brilliant final stroke that balances her more foolish and despicable choices, she left her fortune to the women's movement, funding the work that helped to pass the 19th Amendment. Prioleau, whose earlier works have focused on great seducers and seductresses, is a perfect biographer of Leslie, who was mentored by no less than Lola Montez in the application of womanly charms. “A self-mythologizer,” writes the author, “she saw herself as the legendary Lilith, the immortal gadfly and moral truant, who defied Adam’s dominion and founded her own paradise, filled with ‘jinn’ lovers and a race of ‘glorious,’ ‘rebellious daughters’ ‘claiming the New World as their special domain.’ ” The author uses anachronistic vocabulary and peppers her sentences with words and phrases quoted from source documents, giving the narrative an amusing period feel.
They just don't make characters like this anymore. Kudos to Prioleau for her gallant historical rescue mission.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1450-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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