A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle.
How the Bard has played in America over the centuries.
Shakespearean scholar Shapiro (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.; The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, 2015, etc.) admits that “it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that convinced me to write about Shakespeare in a divided America.” Impeccably researched, the book focuses on how key figures in American history have experienced Shakespeare. Each chapter revolves around a play or two and what was happening socially and politically. Shapiro sets the stage with a discussion of the controversial Central Park production of Julius Caesar a month after the election. The assassination of Caesar by Brutus was seen by some as an attack on the president. The play, writes the author, “spoke directly to the political vertigo many Americans were experiencing.” Shapiro begins exploring that vertigo in 1833, focusing on slavery, miscegenation, Othello, the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble, and former president John Quincy Adams’ disdain for a play about a black man and a white woman. After discussions of “Manifest Destiny” (Romeo and Juliet) and “Class Warfare” (Macbeth), one of Shapiro’s best chapters explores the juxtaposition between Abraham Lincoln, who loved Shakespeare and could quote from the works at length, and actor John Wilkes Booth. Shapiro wonders if Booth’s first-ever performance in Julius Caesar just months before Lincoln’s reelection “fueled [his] violent intentions.” Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1916 description of The Tempest’s Caliban as the “missing link” shows how Shakespeare would be “implicated in the story of American immigration.” Front and center in “Marriage: 1948” is the story of The Taming of the Shrew and how it became Kiss Me, Kate, one of the “most enduring and successful American musicals.” It was “staggering,” Shapiro writes, “what [Cole] Porter got away with.” Lastly, “Adultery and Same-Sex Love” weaves together Twelfth Night, playwright Tom Stoppard, and producer Harvey Weinstein’s demand that Shakespeare in Love have a “happy ending.”
A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-52229-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.
A charmingly pared-down life of the “boys” that grounds their dream of flight in decent character and work ethic.
There is a quiet, stoical awe to the accomplishments of these two unprepossessing Ohio brothers in this fluently rendered, skillfully focused study by two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and two-time National Book Award–winning historian McCullough (The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, 2011, etc.). The author begins with a brief yet lively depiction of the Wright home dynamic: reeling from the death of their mother from tuberculosis in 1889, the three children at home, Wilbur, Orville, and Katharine, had to tend house, as their father, an itinerant preacher, was frequently absent. McCullough highlights the intellectual stimulation that fed these bookish, creative, close-knit siblings. Wilbur was the most gifted, yet his parents’ dreams of Yale fizzled after a hockey accident left the boy with a mangled jaw and broken teeth. The boys first exhibited their mechanical genius in their print shop and then in their bicycle shop, which allowed them the income and space upstairs for machine-shop invention. Dreams of flight were reawakened by reading accounts by Otto Lilienthal and other learned treatises and, specifically, watching how birds flew. Wilbur’s dogged writing to experts such as civil engineer Octave Chanute and the Smithsonian Institute provided advice and response, as others had long been preoccupied by controlled flight. Testing their first experimental glider took the Wrights over several seasons to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to experiment with their “wing warping” methods. There, the strange, isolated locals marveled at these most “workingest boys,” and the brothers continually reworked and repaired at every step. McCullough marvels at their success despite a lack of college education, technical training, “friends in high places” or “financial backers”—they were just boys obsessed by a dream and determined to make it reality.
An educational and inspiring biography of seminal American innovators.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2874-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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