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
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
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