Using a wealth of documentary material, the author depicts with exceptional vividness the life of an elephant that became an...
Biography of a true giant, fleshed out with social history.
Chambers traces Jumbo’s life from his capture in Africa through his long, often controversial residencies in Paris and London zoos to his last days in America. At the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where the elephant arrived after a grueling nine-month journey, shockingly laissez faire treatment left him undersized, diseased and generally dispirited. He was sold to the Zoological Society of London, where mercurial and devious keeper Matthew Scott turned around his fortunes. Thanks to Scott’s nursing, Jumbo grew into one of the largest creatures ever exhibited in the West, and the marketing ploys of the zoo’s crafty superintendent Abraham Bartlett made him an international sensation. Children lined up for hours to ride in a howdah atop the elephant’s willing back. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, battles were raging between Scott and Bartlett, whose mutual loathing gives the narrative a jolt of suspense, and between the zoo and Jumbo, whose temper was almost uncontrollable when he was in musth, a hormonal rush similar to heat. After many years in London, the elephant was sold to P.T. Barnum, expert purveyor of public hokum. When Jumbo refused even to sniff inside the massively reinforced box designed to transport him to America, Barnum transformed a publicity debacle into a coup. Editorials questioned the zoo’s right to export one of England’s major tourist attractions as the general public came in huge numbers to tearfully bid farewell. In America, Jumbo was widely feted as a circus performer, but after several seasons with Barnum’s traveling menagerie, he was killed in a collision with a freight train. It was the end of an era, but his tragic death cemented Jumbo’s legacy.
Using a wealth of documentary material, the author depicts with exceptional vividness the life of an elephant that became an icon.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58642-141-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
