A well-researched, sharp biography.
An independent scholar of Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) history explores the life and work of the first Native American actress, Red Wing (1884-1974).
Born Lilian St. Cyr on the Ho-Chunk Reservation, Red Wing came of age at a time when the U.S. government refused to recognize Native Americans as full citizens. Orphaned at age 4, she was sent to “the Homes,” a boarding school in Philadelphia dedicated to preparing Native American children for lives as servants of the “Great [White] Father.” It was here that she first began to perform for white audiences fascinated by the culture of the “noble savage.” She graduated from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1902 and worked for a time as a domestic in Washington, D.C., and then married James Johnson. The couple went to upstate New York in 1906, where the author hypothesizes that St. Cyr sold her beadwork to tourists caught up in the “Indian craze” sweeping the country. That fall, they went to New York City, where they began crafting theatrical personas for themselves. St. Cyr became Princess Red Wing, and Johnson became Young Deer, in part to hide his African American background. Red Wing landed her first role in the musical Pioneer Days. After that, the couple performed in Wild West vaudeville shows until 1909, when then began working for East Coast–based film companies. They moved to California soon after, and Red Wing worked with screen legends Tom Mix and Max Sennett, and her husband made films. Over the next half-decade, the actress honed the Indian princess role—which Waggoner astutely points out also supported racist stereotypes of the faithful, self-sacrificing Native woman—to perfection. At the height of her fame, she starred in two silent-era classics: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914) and Donald Crisp’s Ramona (1916). Illustrated with black-and-white photographs, this lively biography pays long-overdue tribute to a forgotten star of the silent era while celebrating Native American contributions to the motion picture industry.
A well-researched, sharp biography.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1559-8
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
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
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