Almost by itself, this thin historical record makes the case for Baartman’s wholesale exploitation, and Holmes would have...
The story of Saartjie Baartman, a kidnapped South African who briefly created a sensation in Europe.
In 1809, British officer and surgeon Alexander Dunlop and his manservant Hendrik Cesars illegally transported the orphaned 21-year-old Baartman from Cape Town to London, planning to exhibit her for money. Billed as the Hottentot Venus, she appeared onstage in a flesh-toned body stocking, designed to highlight her protruding buttocks, with an embroidered pubic apron, thought to conceal the legendary extended labia of women of her tribe. An assortment of beads, shells and feathers completed the costume and, set against a backdrop of painted “African” scenery, Baartman sang, danced, played instruments and smoked a pipe. She was an immediate hit. Following a high-profile court case to determine whether her exhibition was voluntary or compelled, she toured the provinces for three years, triumphed in Paris and died in 1815. Her corpse was spirited to the Museum of Natural History for analysis, dissection and preservation of her skeleton, brain and genitals. In 2002, these remains were returned to South Africa, where at a state funeral she was proclaimed “the nation’s grandmother.” Holmes is especially adept at explaining the period’s fascination with the Hottentot Venus, how a combination of curiosity—some of it genuinely scientific—myth, legend and lust transfixed audiences. She does less well examining the story from Baartman’s perspective. Was the drummer boy who fathered her child back in South Africa black or white? How did that child die? Was Baartman pimped out by her keepers shortly before her own death, the cause of which remains unknown? Indeed, the sheer number of plausible explanations for Baartman’s abrupt demise—flu, bronchitis, alcoholism, overwork, depression—illustrates the evidentiary void plaguing the author.
Almost by itself, this thin historical record makes the case for Baartman’s wholesale exploitation, and Holmes would have done better to let that silence speak rather than freight the final chapters with a hopelessly muddled “significance” the story will not bear out.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6136-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
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