A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)
Debut author Collins dissects the fickle fortunes of fame with 13 vignettes of men and women who dared to dream but failed to achieve.
What happens to the schemers and the dreamers whose plans lose their moorings in reality, whose theories do not quite jibe with actuality? Collins introduces us to a medley of such unfortunate souls, including the eponymous John Banvard. This true visionary created “moving panoramas,” an artistic innovation in which he claimed to scroll three miles of canvas before his audience’s unbelieving eyes; the resulting hullabaloo made him the star of the 19th-century art world until he was upstaged by master huckster P.T. Barnum. Now fallen into outright obscurity, Banvard serves as Collins’s leading exemplar of fame gone wrong, of early successes dashed by unlucky combinations of bad timing, bad luck, and bad judgment. The reader also meets such obscure figures as playwright and Shakespearean plagiarist William Henry Ireland, John Cleves Symmes (who attempted to prove that the earth is hollow and inhabited on the inside), Professor Rene Blondlot (discoverer of the non-existent N-rays—similar to X-rays but, well, nonexistent), Ephraim Bull (who lost out to Thomas Welch in the race to cash in on Concord grapes), and A.J. Pleaston (who recommended growing plants and healing humans with the salubrious effects of blue light). These unfortunates, as well as the others Collins has dug up from obscurity, made noble attempts to change the world for the better and failed miserably. One might quibble with some of Collins’s selections for inclusion (some of the failures are not nearly as spectacular as the others), but the joy of the lot lies in contemplating the whims of fortune and the foolhardiness of humanity, while delighting in Collins’s crisp prose and engaging storytelling.
A delightful opportunity to get in touch with your inner loser. (16-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26886-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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
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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
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