A focused, scholarly, definitive life history that gives voice to a pioneering and little-known entertainment legacy.
The history of an itinerant “almost unknown” 19th-century African- American showman who changed the face of one-man entertainment.
Given the many conflicting and sketchy historical accounts of Richard Potter (1783-1835), Hodgson (editor: Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories with Contemporary Critical Essays, 1993, etc.), former dean of Forbes College at Princeton, produces an impressively comprehensive biography. Born in Massachusetts to a black mother and a “well-established white” father, Potter went to Europe as a teenager and trained as a gymnast and tightrope walker. Upon his return to North America in the early 1800s, he became enthralled with Scottish ventriloquist brothers James and John Rannie, who became his mentors. Potter was also influenced by tightrope artist Signior Manfredi and magician William Duff and was motivated by a ventriloquism exhibition series in Philadelphia produced by Duff and John Rannie. Hodgson covers Potter’s early career as a Boston-based ventriloquist, his integration of his wife into his act, and association with “the first black Masonic lodge in America.” The author also explores how Potter had to not only establish himself as a qualified performer, but also “keep his public persona apolitical and uncontroversial” and master his craft “while black.” He went on to garner great fame for his thrilling traveling act featuring magic tricks followed by ventriloquism; for several years, he performed a “Man Salamander” act that involved “handling a red-hot bar of iron and immersing his feet in molten lead.” Through interviews with magicians and ventriloquists, glowing reviews, and information found within various Masonic membership records, Hodgson delivers an illuminating chronicle of Potter’s social network, personal interests, and career trajectory as he launched his act across neighboring states to widespread acclaim. Even amid personal troubles (including the death of his teenage daughter), detractors, competitors, and class antagonists who dubbed him a practitioner in the “deceptive arts,” Potter stood tall and became an icon.
A focused, scholarly, definitive life history that gives voice to a pioneering and little-known entertainment legacy.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4104-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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