A vivid portrayal of the trials and triumphs of two determined men.
The fascinating story of conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), who became wealthy celebrities in Jacksonian America.
When Chang and Eng were 17, they left their native Siam under contract to showmen who planned to exhibit them throughout the world. Their impoverished mother was given $500 and the promise that her boys would return in five years; she never saw them again. Instead of returning home, they rose to fame and fortune in America. Huang (English/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, 2011, etc.) sets the brothers’ improbable story in the context of American culture, attitudes about race and sex, and political turmoil during more than four decades of roiling change. In the author’s shrewd, entertaining narrative, the twins emerge as astute businessmen who, at the age of 21, unequivocally declared their independence from exploitative managers who worked them “like a pair of mules yoked to a grindstone.” Willful and determined, self-educated and articulate, they managed their careers so well that after a decade they were able to retire to a town in rural North Carolina, which later gained fame as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. The twins became naturalized citizens and owned farmland as well as slaves. They married two sisters, creating a unique “conjugal structure” that incited “insidious speculations of tabloid peddlers and curious neighbors” who were shocked at the marriage of white women to Asian men. Between them, they fathered 21 children. By the 1850s, the large brood created such tension in the families’ one house that the twins set up two households, alternating three days in each conjugal bed. Staunch Confederates during the Civil War, they saw their wealth plummet after the South lost, forcing them on the road once again. This time, though, they struggled to find an audience, eventually performing in a German circus; now elderly, they were deemed “pathetic,” “freakish and tasteless.”
A vivid portrayal of the trials and triumphs of two determined men.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-447-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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