A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.
A spirited account of the young Wilde’s inspiring 11-month tour of America.
Morris (Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, 2010, etc.) chronicles a year in the life of Irish dandy and belletrist Wilde, who, at age 27, was bent on invading America the way Dickens had a generation before. An Oxford graduate, poet, student of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and enthusiastic and visible proponent of the aesthetic movement in England, Wilde was, by January 1882, when he arrived in New York, already famous, though few could say why. Wilde was a self-promoting genius, Morris writes, “created, cultivated and commodified,” like celebrities today. He hadn’t yet written his famous works or openly embraced gayness, but in his elaborate, precious outfits, sporting sunflowers and lilies, dropping affected bons mots for journalists to scoop up as he instructed American audiences with authority on “The Beautiful” and “The Artistic Character of the English Renaissance,” Wilde was challenging traditional notions of masculinity and also creating his celebrity. Morris goes step by step in this, drawing on Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst’s book of newspaper interviews Oscar Wilde in America (2010) for a record of his decidedly uneven reception, from rapturous audiences in New York, where Napoleon Sarony took his famous photographs of Wilde in various guises; to Chicago, where he insulted his Midwestern audience for their ugly waterworks; to Denver, San Francisco, the South and Canada. He met Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant and generated “verbal donnybrooks” all along the way. In the end, Wilde and America shared a mutual affection.
A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-06696-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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