The Lives of Chang & Eng
Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1469618303
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLives of Chang and Eng: Siam's Twins in Nineteenth-Century America
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Inseparable
Author: Yunte Huang
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Published: 2018-04-03
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 0871404478
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
The Lives of Chang and Eng
Author: Joseph Andrew Orser
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014-11-03
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1469618311
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConnected at the chest by a band of flesh, Chang and Eng Bunker toured the United States and the world from the 1820s to the 1870s, placing themselves and their extraordinary bodies on exhibit as "freaks of nature" and "Oriental curiosities." More famously known as the Siamese twins, they eventually settled in rural North Carolina, married two white sisters, became slave owners, and fathered twenty-one children between them. Though the brothers constantly professed their normality, they occupied a strange space in nineteenth-century America. They spoke English, attended church, became American citizens, and backed the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet in life and death, the brothers were seen by most Americans as "monstrosities," an affront they were unable to escape. Joseph Andrew Orser chronicles the twins' history, their sometimes raucous journey through antebellum America, their domestic lives in North Carolina, and what their fame revealed about the changing racial and cultural landscape of the United States. More than a biography of the twins, the result is a study of nineteenth-century American culture and society through the prism of Chang and Eng that reveals how Americans projected onto the twins their own hopes and fears.
Mobituaries
Author: Mo Rocca
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-11-02
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1501197630
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom popular TV correspondent and writer Rocca comes a charmingly irreverent and rigorously researched book that celebrates the dead people who made life worth living.
Chang and Eng Reconnected
Author: Cynthia Wu
Publisher:
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 203
ISBN-13: 9781439908686
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConsidering Chang and Eng's body in America from the nineteenth century to the present
Half a Life
Author: Darin Strauss
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-05-31
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 0679643826
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey—graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force. Look for special features inside, including an interview with Colum McCann.
One of Us
Author: Alice Domurat Dreger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2005-10-31
Total Pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780674018259
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of Us views conjoined twinning and other “abnormalities” from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the “normal.”
Translating Mo'um
Author: Cathy Park Hong
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 86
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPoetry. Asian American Studies. "Deft, edgy, dystopic, assiduous in their loathing of the famous fascination of the exotic, Cathy Park Hong's poems burst forth in searing flashes of ire and insight. She gives no quarter to either Korean or English. Without creative interference, without mistranslation, language to her is history's 'cracked' thorax, a resented 'dictation,' and a constant personal embarrassment. Her poems are 'islands without flags,' 'the ocean a slate gray/ along the wolf-hued sand.' TRANSLATING MO'UM is striking both for its stabbingly original, vinegary images and its ruthless honesty: Hong being that rare thing, a poet as rigorous in her self-scrutiny as in her cultural confrontations"-Calvin Bedient.
The Rape of Nanking
Author: Iris Chang
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014-03-11
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 046502825X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe New York Times bestselling account of one of history's most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II, "piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror". (Adam Hochschild, Salon) In December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, tells this history from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic book is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.
The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton
Author: Dean Jensen
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2012-12-12
Total Pages: 433
ISBN-13: 0307814777
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe lives and loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton follows the poignant life story of twin sisters who were literally joined at the hip, set against the tumultuous backdrop of America during the first half of the 20th century. Daisy and Violet and an unforgettable cast of show-business characters come alive on the pages of this carefully researched and sensitively written biography. Reviews "Jensen's book is a testament to the fickleness of the entertainment world." -Tampa Bay Tribune "It is an affecting story, gently and honestly told without frills, without sensation. In Jensen's hands, the twins are always human, individuals, never freaks joined at the hips as the world saw them after their birth in 1908. . . Here, their story is pure." -Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
