First-rate social and theatrical history combined with a dash of Shakespearian critical appreciation: a noteworthy story.
From British journalist Cliff, a lapidary chronicle of a drama turned deadly: the 1849 brawl in front of the New York’s Astor Place Theater that resulted in more than 20 deaths.
The immediate cause assigned to the mayhem was conflict between the robust American style of performing Shakespeare and the daintier English approach. But there was more to it, Cliff demonstrates in his debut. The works of the Bard were part of America’s popular culture, familiar to all. Favored performers boasted fans to rival those of any modern day rap or rock artist. Forceful American Edwin Forrest, “The Native Tragedian,” was a studly heartthrob. Acutely sensitive Englishman William Charles Macready, “The Eminent Tragedian,” practiced more thoughtful interpretation. These dueling thespians appealed to disparate classes in national society. The kid-gloved swells appreciated Macready’s effete English mode of acting, while plebian nativists favored Forrest’s hearty American take. Their fanatical supporters caused the stars, once quite fond of each other, to become acting enemies. In the fateful spring of 1849, as the touring Macready arrived in New York, they scheduled conflicting performances of Macbeth, a signature role for both. Vowing to rout the fancy Englishman and his clique, the city’s feisty Bowery b’hoys and hustlers took to the streets, and the tragedy was played out. Cliff skillfully portrays the successes, failures and feelings of the lead actors, as well as a supporting cast that includes Charles Dickens and rascally dime novelist Ned Buntline. High drama prevails right up to the final curtain.
First-rate social and theatrical history combined with a dash of Shakespearian critical appreciation: a noteworthy story.Pub Date: April 23, 2007
ISBN: 0-345-48694-3
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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