Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History - Hardcover

Huang, Yunte

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9780871404473: Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0871404478 ISBN 13: 9780871404473
Publisher: Liveright, 2018

Synopsis

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist (Biography)
New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year
One of NPR's Great Reads of 2018
A Newsweek Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity, and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America’s most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins.

Nearly 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. 28 illustrations

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About the Author

Yunte Huang, a Guggenheim Fellow, has taught at Harvard and the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English. The author of the Edgar Award–winning biography Charlie Chan and Inseparable, both NBCC finalists, Huang speaks frequently about American popular culture.

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Publisher
Liveright
Publication date
2018
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0871404478
ISBN 13 
9780871404473
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
416
Rating
  • 3.60 out of 5 stars
    650 ratings by Goodreads

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781631495458: Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1631495453 ISBN 13:  9781631495458
Publisher: Liveright, 2019
Softcover