Informative and well-researched, Kasson’s work offers insight into one of Hollywood’s most beloved entertainers, as well as...
A cultural historian examines how the films of Shirley Temple (1928–2014) worked in tandem with New Deal politics to help Americans overcome the Great Depression.
The images most associated with the 1930s bear witness to the hardships average Americans faced. But the ones most popular during this time bore the radiant face of child actress Temple. In this study, Kasson (History and American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America, 2001, etc.) argues that Temple’s smile and sunny personality helped bring Franklin Roosevelt’s “politics of cheer” to the forefront of national consciousness while providing Americans with much-needed emotional solace. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, which made government assistance available to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” only went so far. Consumer confidence, which implied faith in the future, also had to be restored to ensure the return of prosperity. Roosevelt accomplished part of this task through the vigorously cheerful outlook he projected in his political addresses. From 1934 to 1940, Temple captivated movie-going audiences all over the United States and the world with her ability to heal broken hearts with her “inexhaustible fund of optimism.” Through her extraordinary dance partnership with black entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Temple also called attention to the problem of race in both Hollywood and the United States while bringing hope to African-Americans, who had suffered even more than whites during the Depression. The cult of personality that developed around Temple even helped the struggling economy. At the height of the young star’s popularity, fans spent millions of dollars on Temple memorabilia.
Informative and well-researched, Kasson’s work offers insight into one of Hollywood’s most beloved entertainers, as well as the fascinating connection between politics and entertainment.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24079-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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