In Steinmeyer’s capable hands, Robinson becomes a walking, talking illusion and a reminder: never trust appearances when in...
For a magician, William Robinson was a surprisingly indelicate man, detailed in this suitably beguiling portrait from Steinmeyer (Hiding the Elephant, 2003).
Though Robinson was to gain international notoriety as the Chinese conjurer Chung Ling Soo, he cut his teeth as a creator of magic tricks and as an assistant to such greats as Harry Kellar and Alexander Herrmann. Steinmeyer, a designer of illusions himself, is clearly taken with Robinson for his technical proficiency, imagination and originality; he’s also dexterous in handling Robinson’s convoluted life (although he isn’t especially impressed with this aspect of the man). Robinson was a philanderer, a secret sharer who had what amounted to three families at the same time, ultimately never giving much satisfaction to any of them. He engaged in espionage, shuttling tricks from one player to another, even stealing Ching Ling Foo’s great show from under him. One of Steinmeyer’s own neat tricks is explaining Robinson’s illusions in a way that doesn’t deflate the reader’s pleasure. Robinson’s work, from his black arts (so called because the careful adjustment of stage lights allows a black backdrop to dematerialize black objects in front of it) through the tricks from China that he managed to deconstruct into his own marvelous mechanical concoctions, are unfurled to let their hidden brilliance shine. Steinmeyer is equally captivating in tracing the changes in Soo’s image as seen by the public. At first, he fit snugly into the Victorian-Orientalist fantasy of old China. Later, he had to contend with the prejudice fostered by the Boxer Rebellion, an event that he dealt with in his “Condemned to Death by the Boxers” routine—a routine that would be the death of him—to demonstrate his loyalty. In the end, he showed how even a faux Chinaman could subvert the discrimination of the times through being honored as a Chinese artist.
In Steinmeyer’s capable hands, Robinson becomes a walking, talking illusion and a reminder: never trust appearances when in the presence of a magician.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1512-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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