She done her wrong.
Did the sassy, hip-wiggling Hollywood goddess of the double-entendre base her image, her career, and her comedy on African-American culture?
Since her death in 1981 at 87, Mae West’s reputation has been rising. Once viewed as a tawdry, camp caricature who ceaselessly exploited her bad-girl burlesque, she’s more recently been hailed as a proto-feminist who wrote her own plays, directed herself, and refused to be manipulated by the Hollywood studios. Watts (History/California State; God, Harlem, U.S.A, 1992) adds another twist by portraying West as an archetypal African-American trickster heroine who may have had a black ancestor (on her father’s side) and who certainly found her initial theatrical inspiration in the songs and comedy of Bert Williams and the earthy blues of Bessie Smith. (West always credited these artists, as well as drag queens, as key influences.) “The African-American practice of signifying, a subversive rhetorical device that uses multiple and conflicting messages to obscure rebellious meanings” was the primary element West adapted to her performing style, states Watts. The author goes on to speculate that because West’s parents encouraged her to perform as a sexually precocious preteen, she must have been sexually abused; furthermore, Watts argues, West identified with the blacks and homosexuals as exploited individuals who had to resort to subterfuge to express themselves artistically. The author’s urge to tie West to African-American culture becomes shrill when she consistently characterizes She Done Him Wrong, My Little Chickadee, and West’s other movie comedies as calculated triumphs of cultural subversion aimed at the white establishment. It’s possible that they were funny, too.
She done her wrong.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-510547-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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