It’s a backstage tour of the fair, but enter for the academic air. If it’s simple carny fun you seek, look for the egress.
After Barnum and before Spielberg, there was Fred Thompson, the perfect prototype of a 20th-century showman.
Now largely forgotten, Thompson (1873–1919) was not just an inventive entrepreneur of carefree amusement but no less than one of the makers of modern society, according to cultural historian Register (American Studies/Sewanee). The professor extracts much significance from the brief career of the promoter who devised extravagant Midway entertainments for expositions at the turn of the 20th century and developed the amusement park as we know it today. Thompson altered Coney Island much the way Disney changed 42nd Street when he built the fabled Luna Park in 1903, creating family entertainment where tawdry pleasures had ruled. He erected the gigantic Hippodrome in midtown Manhattan and filled it for a single giddy year (1905–06) with spectacle upon spectacle. A dedicated shop, the Industrial Light and Magic of its day, produced the Hippodrome’s lavish effects. When it became necessary to recruit backers, Thompson called on money men like the celebrated “Bet-a-Million” Gates. But all the kitsch, bunkum, and ballyhoo couldn’t support the constant need for cash, and eventually the music stopped. The Hippodrome, always losing money, finally succumbed under other management. Others took over Luna Park as well, though it survived in altered form until three fires killed it in the 1940s. But hardly more than a decade after Luna Park closed, Disneyland opened. Register spills much ink on sonorous pronouncements about the meaning of it all, citing, in particular, the impact of androgynous Peter Pan. There are many overdrawn digressions regarding architecture, toys, retailing, movies, space travel, sex, gender studies, and the zeitgeist in general. It’s an aggressively educational text, loading large social implications about the evolution of the amusement industry onto the sketchy story of one its important practitioners.
It’s a backstage tour of the fair, but enter for the academic air. If it’s simple carny fun you seek, look for the egress.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-514493-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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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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