by A.E. Hotchner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2010
An intimate, uplifting account of a profound friendship and a boyish lark that grew into a spectacularly successful...
Playwright and biographer Hotchner (The Good Life According to Hemingway, 2008, etc.) affectionately reflects on his decades-long friendship with iconic actor Paul Newman.
The author and Newman bonded during the production of a 1955 TV play that proved to be a turning point in both their careers—Newman was nervously replacing the recently deceased James Dean in a Hemingway story adapted by Hotchner—and the resulting teasing and competitive friendship endured until the actor’s death in 2008. The bulk of Hotchner’s narrative concerns the establishment of the Newman’s Own line of gourmet foods, begun as a lark by the duo in Newman’s barn, where they mixed up a vat of the actor’s signature salad dressing with a dirty oar. From such humble beginnings grew a philanthropic powerhouse, distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to various charities, despite an army of naysayers and seemingly insurmountable odds. The author stresses the playfulness of Newman’s quixotic desire to enter the food industry, and the competitiveness and breezy optimism that characterized Newman’s attitude toward the project. The pair also established a special summer camp for seriously ill children, again bringing a dauntingly complicated and expensive project to fruition with little more than nerve and contrariness. The Newman that emerges from Hotchner’s remembrances is an immensely likable figure, compulsively unpretentious and self-deprecating, hungry for fun and adventure. There are a few scenes highlighting Newman’s movie-star milieu, including a beer-fueled tennis match with Robert Redford and MPAA head Jack Valenti, and a taste test administered by Newman neighbor Martha Stewart. But the author focuses on the actor away from Hollywood, engaged in his passions for racing, boating and just hanging out and shooting the breeze. Sections on the suicide of Newman’s troubled son and a heartbreaking account of the actor’s failing health add melancholic notes to the story, but Hotchner’s memoir is ultimately an inspirational portrait of an extraordinary man.
An intimate, uplifting account of a profound friendship and a boyish lark that grew into a spectacularly successful enterprise.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53233-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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