A focused, scholarly, definitive life history that gives voice to a pioneering and little-known entertainment legacy.
The history of an itinerant “almost unknown” 19th-century African- American showman who changed the face of one-man entertainment.
Given the many conflicting and sketchy historical accounts of Richard Potter (1783-1835), Hodgson (editor: Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, 1993, etc.), former dean of Forbes College at Princeton, produces an impressively comprehensive biography. Born in Massachusetts to a black mother and a “well-established white” father, Potter went to Europe as a teenager and trained as a gymnast and tightrope walker. Upon his return to North America in the early 1800s, he became enthralled with Scottish ventriloquist brothers James and John Rannie, who became his mentors. Potter was also influenced by tightrope artist Signior Manfredi and magician William Duff and was motivated by a ventriloquism exhibition series in Philadelphia produced by Duff and John Rannie. Hodgson covers Potter’s early career as a Boston-based ventriloquist, his integration of his wife into his act, and association with “the first black Masonic lodge in America.” The author also explores how Potter had to not only establish himself as a qualified performer, but also “keep his public persona apolitical and uncontroversial” and master his craft “while black.” He went on to garner great fame for his thrilling traveling act featuring magic tricks followed by ventriloquism; for several years, he performed a “Man Salamander” act that involved “handling a red-hot bar of iron and immersing his feet in molten lead.” Through interviews with magicians and ventriloquists, glowing reviews, and information found within various Masonic membership records, Hodgson delivers an illuminating chronicle of Potter’s social network, personal interests, and career trajectory as he launched his act across neighboring states to widespread acclaim. Even amid personal troubles (including the death of his teenage daughter), detractors, competitors, and class antagonists who dubbed him a practitioner in the “deceptive arts,” Potter stood tall and became an icon.
A focused, scholarly, definitive life history that gives voice to a pioneering and little-known entertainment legacy.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4104-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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