A beautifully designed, if sometimes historically simplified, overview of a very specific type of advertising representation.
Humber, in his latest series installment, surveys the representation of women in historic cigar-box lithographs.
During the second half of the 19th century, men all over America regularly smoked cigars. It’s no surprise, then, that the lithographs that adorned their wooden cigar boxes were a staple of late-19th- and early-20th-century popular culture. As demonstrated in past entries in the author’s multivolume exploration of this phenomenon, the images sought to draw customers in with myriad artistic styles and, often, depictions of famous historical figures. This final volume of the series effectively demonstrates that “for every Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln cigar box…there were competing cigar containers displaying seductive women.” Yet, while many of these sexualized displays featured anonymous subjects in revealing burlesque attire, there were others that celebrated the historic impact of specific women on American and world history. This book highlights about 90 of those lithographs with full-color images that adorn every page, providing context and commentary not only on the cigar art itself, but also on the lives of the historical figures they portrayed. Well-known women who adorned cigar boxes during this period included writer and activist Helen Keller, nurses Clara Barton and Dorothy Dix, and seamstress Betsy Ross. Two of the most collectible cigar boxes of the era, Humber informatively points out, featured Shakespearean actress Julia Marlowe and Joan of Arc. The book inclusively offers many depictions of women of color, but its historical commentary can sometimes feel pollyannish. For instance, when discussing an image on Claro-Maduro cigars from the 1890s that featured two young girls (one Black, one white), the book speculates that the image represents “an optimistic future where one’s skin color, no matter what generation, is not at all a contentious matter.” However, this interpretation belies the frequent, if paradoxical, depictions of harmony between Black and white children by white artists who were in favor of slavery and segregation, dating back to the antebellum period.
A beautifully designed, if sometimes historically simplified, overview of a very specific type of advertising representation.Pub Date: April 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781038345110
Page Count: 190
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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