The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction

Wishlist

Saved in this browser only - it isn't synced to your other devices.

Back to the full ranking
Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History cover

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

Yunte Huang

0

awards won

4

score

#2085 of 3,809 books · #729 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (2018).

In this portrait of America's famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874) a comment on the times in which we live. Huang depicts the twins' implausible route to assimilation after their "discovery" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824 and arrival in Boston as sideshow curiosities in 1829. Their climb from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich, southern gentry who profited from entertaining the Jacksonian mobs; 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 tyrannizing the other—a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.

Buy this book at AmazonAd
Publisher
Liveright Publishing
ISBN-13
9781631493850
Topics
Conjoined twins19th-century AmericaRace and identity

Other awarded books from Yunte Huang

If you liked Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History, you could also like these

Similar Topics