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
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
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