by Jim Steinmeyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2011
A low-key but thoroughly fascinating biography.
Entertaining rescue of a forgotten show-business legend.
We tend to associate modern magic with Houdini, but he was not considered a great magician by most of his contemporaries. If asked to name the greatest magician, most would have named a Houdini rival, an entertainer few today have even heard of: Howard Thurston (1869–1936). When we think of the debonair performer in black tie who patters suavely with the audience while sawing women in half or pulling rabbits out of hats, we are conjuring the image Thurston spent 40 years in show business perfecting. According to Steinmeyer (Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural, 2008), a magician, illusion designer and scholar of magic, Thurston may have lacked the dexterity and originality of some of his illustrious peers, but he brought the elements together to drag theatrical magic into the modern world. What made Thurston so great, Steinmeyer argues, was his utter belief in his own con. Though cultivating the illusion of the modern entertainer as a bland, upright businessman, Thurston was actually a one-time street urchin and pickpocket who, while on his way up, was not above grifting when the occasion called for it. The author ably conveys Thurston’s intriguing milieu and relentless adventuring (much of which he labored mightily to hide from the public)—his train-hopping boyhood and travels between carnivals to medicine shows in the wild West as an apprentice magician, his vaudeville and music-hall tours of the United States and Europe, his 1905–06 tour of Australia and the Far East and “last stand” as an itinerant movie-theater performer at the height of the Depression. Thurston’s rise to the heights of showbiz fame paralleled the thrilling American boom years between the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and the financial crash of 1929, and Steinmeyer, in his quiet, workmanlike way, captures it all vividly.
A low-key but thoroughly fascinating biography.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58542-845-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jim Steinmeyer
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Award Winner
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.