by Robert Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 6, 2019
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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