A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.
A fresh look at Oscar Wilde’s English, Irish, and American contexts.
As “gay history’s Christ figure,” Wilde (1854-1900) has been amply investigated by biographers and literary historians, but Mendelssohn (English/Oxford Univ.; Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, 2007, etc.) was surprised by a discovery she made in a library archive: six small cards, each depicting Wilde with a different ethnicity: Irish, Chinese, French, German, black, and white American. In addition, she found a Currier and Ives poster of Wilde with brown skin, thick lips, and “spiky Afro hair.” The provocative images, she writes, inspired her quest “to solve the mystery of Wilde’s identity.” Although she claims that her research reveals a “secret life” unknown to previous writers, in fact much of Mendelssohn’s entertaining study conveys a familiar portrait of the ambitious aesthete: his “larger-than-life parents,” Sir William, a renowned oculist, and his eccentric wife, Jane; Wilde’s experiences at Oxford, where he hosted “exotic” soirees in his college rooms and won honors for his intellectual prowess; his literary reputation as a poet and playwright; his exhausting American tour; marriage and fatherhood; and his precipitous downfall, which led to incarceration in Reading Gaol. Mendelssohn’s contribution to Wilde’s legacy is her fresh look at the American tour, providing social and cultural context that helps to explain the mystery of the disconcerting images. In 1882, Wilde disembarked in New York into a swirling eddy of assumptions about race, class, and gender. The foppish 27-year-old generated curiosity—sometimes cruel—about his manliness. His lectures, which at first were “painful,” the New York Times reported, invited parodies. His unscrupulous manager promoted him as if he were one of P.T. Barnum’s freaks, and the press mounted “degrading attacks,” such as caricaturing him as “Mr Wild of Borneo,” an image of Wilde as “a negrified Paddy.” Blackface minstrelsy, a hugely popular form of entertainment, lampooned him. The Currier and Ives poster, Mendelssohn concludes, reflected the inseparable connection of “Negrophobia and Celtophobia” in 19th-century America.
A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-880236-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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