A larger-than-life story, told with panache.
Shevelow (English/Univ. of Calif., San Diego) reconstructs the life of a colorful, cross-dressing thespian.
Charlotte Cibber Charke (1713–60) was one of the most talked-about actresses in 18th-century London. She took to the stage at Drury Lane, managed several theater companies (one of the first women to do so), developed a puppet show devoted to Shakespeare, and criss-crossed the country as a strolling player. Nor was her entrepreneurship limited to theater: Charlotte briefly ran an “oil and grocery shop” that stocked “Oils, Pickles, Soap, Salt, Hams, and several other Family Necessaries.” A short marriage to Richard Charke produced one daughter, Kitty. After a few tempestuous conjugal years, unable to pay the court fees for a formal divorce, Charlotte and Richard simply moved into separate lodgings. The more enduring relationship—and perhaps the greatest role of Charke’s life—was with a woman Charlotte identified as Mrs. Brown. Charlotte played the role of Mr. Brown, and the world (except for a few theater friends) took the couple to be a married man and woman. The great strength here is Shevelow’s refusal to flatten out and pigeonhole the dazzling Charlotte. In her hands, Charke is not just a famous actress, nor a strong woman in an age of patriarchy, nor simply an excuse to talk about the history of sexual identity. She is all of these—and an important contributor to the history of puppetry to boot. Shevelow admirably situates Charlotte’s singular life in larger currents and contexts. When discussing Mr. and Mrs. Brown, for instance, the author gives us a concise history of “female husbands” in 18th-century British courts. She pithily explains that Charlotte’s sexuality is hard to categorize, because “our modern notions of ‘lesbian’ and ‘identity’ . . . did not exist as such in Charlotte’s world.” Despite all this nuance, Shevelow doesn’t sidestep the issue; she believes the Browns were probably lovers and that their relationship was akin to the relationships of lesbian couples today.
A larger-than-life story, told with panache.Pub Date: April 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7314-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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