A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.
A fresh look at Oscar Wilde’s English, Irish, and American contexts.
As “gay history’s Christ figure,” Wilde (1854-1900) has been amply investigated by biographers and literary historians, but Mendelssohn (English/Oxford Univ.; Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, 2007, etc.) was surprised by a discovery she made in a library archive: six small cards, each depicting Wilde with a different ethnicity: Irish, Chinese, French, German, black, and white American. In addition, she found a Currier and Ives poster of Wilde with brown skin, thick lips, and “spiky Afro hair.” The provocative images, she writes, inspired her quest “to solve the mystery of Wilde’s identity.” Although she claims that her research reveals a “secret life” unknown to previous writers, in fact much of Mendelssohn’s entertaining study conveys a familiar portrait of the ambitious aesthete: his “larger-than-life parents,” Sir William, a renowned oculist, and his eccentric wife, Jane; Wilde’s experiences at Oxford, where he hosted “exotic” soirees in his college rooms and won honors for his intellectual prowess; his literary reputation as a poet and playwright; his exhausting American tour; marriage and fatherhood; and his precipitous downfall, which led to incarceration in Reading Gaol. Mendelssohn’s contribution to Wilde’s legacy is her fresh look at the American tour, providing social and cultural context that helps to explain the mystery of the disconcerting images. In 1882, Wilde disembarked in New York into a swirling eddy of assumptions about race, class, and gender. The foppish 27-year-old generated curiosity—sometimes cruel—about his manliness. His lectures, which at first were “painful,” the New York Times reported, invited parodies. His unscrupulous manager promoted him as if he were one of P.T. Barnum’s freaks, and the press mounted “degrading attacks,” such as caricaturing him as “Mr Wild of Borneo,” an image of Wilde as “a negrified Paddy.” Blackface minstrelsy, a hugely popular form of entertainment, lampooned him. The Currier and Ives poster, Mendelssohn concludes, reflected the inseparable connection of “Negrophobia and Celtophobia” in 19th-century America.
A familiar biography embedded in a lively cultural history.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-880236-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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