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 intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and “a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private.”
Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to “control and tame the narrative,” further explaining that she has “so long and so passionately resisted the victim role” because she does not view herself as “purely a victim” and not “purely powerless.” However, she adds, that does not mean she “was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there.” Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: “To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free.”
An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2801-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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