A serviceable introduction to a man who helped shape his culture.
Before he became a circus impresario, Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) was already one of the most famous men in America.
In an admiring and mostly entertaining biography, American Scholar editor Wilson (Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, 2013, etc.) traces Barnum’s flamboyant career through decades of successes, financial scandals, failures, and reinvention. A brash showman, museum owner, sought-after lecturer, real estate developer, banker, Connecticut state legislator, Bridgeport mayor, and bestselling author, Barnum, in all his endeavors, “was a promoter and self-promoter without peer, a relentless advertiser” of events and exhibits that attracted the “feverish interest” of audiences in America and abroad. Drawing liberally on Barnum’s several autobiographies and collected letters, the author reprises many familiar episodes, especially his promotion of hoaxes, such as Joice Heth, a blind, toothless African American woman whom Barnum exhibited as a former nursemaid to George Washington; the upper body of a small monkey attached to the lower half of a large fish, which Barnum touted as the “Fejee Mermaid”; and an 18-year-old microcephalic black man whom Barnum dressed in a furry ape costume and exhibited as a missing link between human and animal. Feeding viewers’ desire for physical oddities, Barnum featured exhibits of several “small people,” such as Charles Stratton, who became General Tom Thumb and eventually married, to great fanfare, a “charming female little person,” whom Barnum also put under contract. While acknowledging the racism and exploitation inherent in these exhibits, as well as Barnum’s attitudes toward captured wild animals, Wilson gently portrays Barnum as a man of his time. In the 1850s, he pushed in a new direction, proselytizing for the temperance movement and emphasizing the educational benefits of his American Museum. He signed a world-famous Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind, whose concerts were phenomenal successes. In 1871, Barnum directed his showmanship to “a museum, menagerie, caravan and hippodrome” that marked the beginning of his illustrious circus career.
A serviceable introduction to a man who helped shape his culture.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1862-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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