Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
Terrific, albeit corny, opening. The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming!
ReplyDeleteI suppose that served as the necessary hook at the time ; )
ReplyDeleteReading that excerpt, though, does show that most of what I consider best about the Skloot book had already been written before -- including the graphic descriptions of cancer cells like pearls and that amazing realization of the humanness of Henrietta Lacks and that she once was more than her cells.
ReplyDeleteWhen you think about it, Skloot was on the right track, wanting to write the biography of an otherwise almost anonymous woman. Unfortunately, she didn't seem up to the task. I agree with your comment earlier that the book reads like someone's first draft. That was my impression, too.
That said, I read it to the end. Incredible story that I just hadn't heard about before, even though I worked for years with microbiologists and (environmental) biotechnologists. Maybe that's why I found it so fascinating.
I see that Skloot was pretty hard on Gold, especially in mentioning the autopsy.
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