Superb, well-researched history, brilliantly alive.
A dazzling history of the first African-American theater company in New York, focusing on principal actor James Hewlett.
In 1799, the state legislature “ended” slavery: all children born to slave women after July 4, 1799, would be free—after 25 to 28 years in indentured servitude. Against this backdrop, a small group of free northern blacks, in 1821, formed a theater troupe. White (History/Univ. of Sydney; Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture, 1998) notes that in 1821 acting was “the exclusive and natural preserve of whites,” but the new company staged Shakespeare, particularly Richard III, with the lead played by Hewlett, who had been the servant of two English actors. In 1822, the troupe moved next door to the Park Theater. As Hewlett began his soliloquy one evening, the police halted the drama, took the cast into custody, and released them only after their promise “never to act Shakespeare again.” In its old quarters, the company mounted new productions, but months later a group of men entered the theater and attacked the actors, destroying scenery, lamps, and stage curtain. Afterward, the company performed intermittently, in New York and on tour, and in 1823, Hewlett began a career with a one-person show, a format then unknown. By 1825, he was at the height of his career, with plans to travel to London. Sadly, another New York performer, Ira Aldridge, got there first and presented much of Hewlett’s act as his own. Back home, as the American public turned to minstrel shows for entertainment, Hewlett found less and less work, got caught up in the criminal world, served a two-year sentence, and was released in 1839, in his 50s. He took the first boat from New York and disembarked at Port of Spain, Trinidad. There, he briefly revived his stage career before disappearing without a trace.
Superb, well-researched history, brilliantly alive.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-674-00893-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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