Almost by itself, this thin historical record makes the case for Baartman’s wholesale exploitation, and Holmes would have...
The story of Saartjie Baartman, a kidnapped South African who briefly created a sensation in Europe.
In 1809, British officer and surgeon Alexander Dunlop and his manservant Hendrik Cesars illegally transported the orphaned 21-year-old Baartman from Cape Town to London, planning to exhibit her for money. Billed as the Hottentot Venus, she appeared onstage in a flesh-toned body stocking, designed to highlight her protruding buttocks, with an embroidered pubic apron, thought to conceal the legendary extended labia of women of her tribe. An assortment of beads, shells and feathers completed the costume and, set against a backdrop of painted “African” scenery, Baartman sang, danced, played instruments and smoked a pipe. She was an immediate hit. Following a high-profile court case to determine whether her exhibition was voluntary or compelled, she toured the provinces for three years, triumphed in Paris and died in 1815. Her corpse was spirited to the Museum of Natural History for analysis, dissection and preservation of her skeleton, brain and genitals. In 2002, these remains were returned to South Africa, where at a state funeral she was proclaimed “the nation’s grandmother.” Holmes is especially adept at explaining the period’s fascination with the Hottentot Venus, how a combination of curiosity—some of it genuinely scientific—myth, legend and lust transfixed audiences. She does less well examining the story from Baartman’s perspective. Was the drummer boy who fathered her child back in South Africa black or white? How did that child die? Was Baartman pimped out by her keepers shortly before her own death, the cause of which remains unknown? Indeed, the sheer number of plausible explanations for Baartman’s abrupt demise—flu, bronchitis, alcoholism, overwork, depression—illustrates the evidentiary void plaguing the author.
Almost by itself, this thin historical record makes the case for Baartman’s wholesale exploitation, and Holmes would have done better to let that silence speak rather than freight the final chapters with a hopelessly muddled “significance” the story will not bear out.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6136-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
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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