She done her wrong.
Did the sassy, hip-wiggling Hollywood goddess of the double-entendre base her image, her career, and her comedy on African-American culture?
Since her death in 1981 at 87, Mae West’s reputation has been rising. Once viewed as a tawdry, camp caricature who ceaselessly exploited her bad-girl burlesque, she’s more recently been hailed as a proto-feminist who wrote her own plays, directed herself, and refused to be manipulated by the Hollywood studios. Watts (History/California State; God, Harlem, U.S.A, 1992) adds another twist by portraying West as an archetypal African-American trickster heroine who may have had a black ancestor (on her father’s side) and who certainly found her initial theatrical inspiration in the songs and comedy of Bert Williams and the earthy blues of Bessie Smith. (West always credited these artists, as well as drag queens, as key influences.) “The African-American practice of signifying, a subversive rhetorical device that uses multiple and conflicting messages to obscure rebellious meanings” was the primary element West adapted to her performing style, states Watts. The author goes on to speculate that because West’s parents encouraged her to perform as a sexually precocious preteen, she must have been sexually abused; furthermore, Watts argues, West identified with the blacks and homosexuals as exploited individuals who had to resort to subterfuge to express themselves artistically. The author’s urge to tie West to African-American culture becomes shrill when she consistently characterizes She Done Him Wrong, My Little Chickadee, and West’s other movie comedies as calculated triumphs of cultural subversion aimed at the white establishment. It’s possible that they were funny, too.
She done her wrong.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-510547-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
