A sharp piece of revisionist argument.
A former editor of the New York Times Book Review persuasively argues that the man whose stage name is a byword for offensive stereotyping was in fact a sly provocateur and a race-conscious agitator.
Lincoln Perry is usually remembered as an actor who pandered to white prejudices by playing the shallow, ingratiating black buffoon billed as the “laziest man in the world,” a gullible, rural rube, all exaggerated facial expression and body language—in short, an insult to his race. But was he something else altogether? Was he, perhaps, a man possessed of considerable talent and folk wit that he used to subvert the very stereotypes he was reviled for portraying? Watkins shows how the working-class black audience who came to see “Stepin Fetchit” picked up on this subversive intent, while middle-class African-Americans saw only the insult. Equally insulted were those who couldn’t abide Perry’s off-stage and -screen bellicosity and ambition. This was no way for a black man to behave in mid-20th-century America, they felt. No doubt his wealth and sense of entitlement stuck in many craws, and his personal life only fed the fires. Perry couldn’t have been farther from Booker T. Washington’s principles of moderation and thrift: “I don’t need no insurance,” he said. “Ah ain’t never goin’ to save a dollar. . . . When I die, jes’ throw me out in the street.” Mustering ammunition from Perry’s newspaper columns, insightful reviews and his own believable interpretation of historical context, the author depicts a man who skillfully burlesqued mainstream America’s contemptuous vision of blacks, a brilliant comic actor who pioneered black achievements in the film industry. Perry was also an arch individualist who had no patience later in his life with groups like the NAACP “playin’ both ends and the middle.” This didn’t help him reconcile his roles with his intentions.
A sharp piece of revisionist argument.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42382-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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