Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately...
The frankly amazing story of the black D.W. Griffith.
Biographer McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness, 2003, etc.) gives a fascinating account of the eventful life of Oscar Micheaux, the first significant African-American filmmaker, a Promethean figure whose current relative obscurity is nothing short of baffling. Micheaux, the child of former slaves, exhibited unusual ambition and determination from a young age, leaving his home of Great Bend, Kan., while still a teenager to work as a Pullman porter. A handsome, intelligent, well-read young man (he inherited a reverence for education and the tenets of Booker T. Washington from his mother), Micheaux moved easily across the racial divide, striking up friendships with white passengers and engaging them in long conversations about the world beyond his own experience. Micheaux appreciated the relatively good money, travel and prestige afforded by his job with Pullman, but was sickened by the required servility and the graft that was endemic in the profession. He made the astonishing decision to go west and join the ranks of thousands of hopeful homesteaders—overwhelmingly white—and establish a farming concern in South Dakota. He succeeded in this venture, and in winning over his curious white neighbors. These experiences provided grist for his many novels and groundbreaking films, unprecedented in their translation of the American black experience to the screen. How did a self-made black farmer come to publish novels and direct movies in 1919? For the ever-industrious Micheaux, the answer was simple: Create your own publishing and film-production companies. The filmmaker comes vividly to life in McGilligan’s narrative, as the author quotes copiously from Micheaux’s letters and autobiographical works, revealing the optimism, erudition, insight and flashes of self-deprecating wit behind his mind-boggling accomplishments and dizzyingly complicated personal life.
Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately felt and endlessly fascinating look at a singular American life.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-073139-7
Page Count: 392
Publisher: HC/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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