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 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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