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

In this excellent portrait of Americas famed nineteenth-century Siamese twins, celebrated biographer Yunte Huang discovers in the conjoined lives of Chang and Eng Bunker (18111874) a trenchant comment on the times in which we live (An astonishing story, by turns ghastly, hilarious, unnerving, and moving.Stephen Greenblatt, author of In the follow-up to his Edgar Award-winning Charlie Chan biography, Huang uncovers ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called the tyranny of the normal. Excellent.... Mr. Huang compellingly makes his case that racism was a factor in these two self-made gentlemen land owners still being considered, late in life, as nothing more than a Barnumesque freak show.... Its not difficult to find in this, as Mr. Huang most definitely does, a comment on the times in which we live. Engrossing.... give[s] an unvarnished look at the degradation and disparagement the brothers had to endure. Chang and Eng waltzed, arm and arm, indivisible, across a brutally divided America. Huang's spellbinding account tells their story with a complexity, and sensitivity, with which it has never been told before. Many of the subjects are timely today, such as the racial injustices the twins faced as Asian immigrants, often doubly worse for them due to their conjoined state.... Moving, wise, and wide-ranging, Excellent.... a complex literary history that mirrors the global story of meetings between east and west. Huang knows the treacherous racial terrain behind the meetings of facts and fictions in American culture [and] the place of race in every rendezvous with American history. Learned and playful,US