Over-argued, under-organized examination of the cultural significance of blackface in American film. Blackface is one of those phenomena that time has made almost utterly incomprehensible. What was there about the sight of a white man, ``all corked up,'' performing as a black minstrel, that appealed to audiences? Certainly, there was a transgressive thrill in this carnivalesque appropriation of identity, but how to explain its phenomenal popularity, not only in vaudeville but in movies right through WW II? Rogin's (Ronald Reagan, The Movie, 1987, etc.) answer is that blackface was a way for new Americans—particularly Jewish immigrants—to join the mainstream: ``Blackface flourished in the transitional period when immigrants and their children were leaving behind Old World identities and trying on new ones.'' Rogin may be on to something. From its very beginnings Hollywood was run largely by Jewish businessmen. Again, the first ``talkie,'' The Jazz Singer, was all about a Jewish blackface performer. This is tantalizing evidence, but Rogin goes too far when he tries to make blackface into a great Archimedean lever of American culture: ``The view through burnt cork places race relations at the center of mass politics and culture in the United States.'' This kind of sweeping overstatement is typical of Rogin's style. He also refuses to quit when he's ahead. Rogin tries unsuccessfully to extend his argument up to the period when real black acvtors began appearing in films by taking it to absurd extremes. For example, Singin' in the Rain reflects ``anxiety about black dance influence.'' In comparison to his analysis of blackface, his treatment of Jewish assimilation also seems insufficient. An intelligent but sometimes too clever deconstruction of this strange, disquieting aspect of early cinema. (61 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-520-20407-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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