Yule has written better-than-average lives of Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and David Puttnam, among other works; here, Richard Lester only seems a lesser figure until you weigh his full plate of achievements. Lester (b. 1932) broke into entertainment in Philadelphia in 1951 at WCAU-TV, where he mounted five shows daily, including a personal failure featuring himself whose reviews begged for the show's death. Philadelphia offering little future, then, he took off for England, fell in with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, fresh from radio's The Goon Show, and directed them in a new TV show, Idiot Weekly, whose surreal comedy lifted English reviewers into ecstasies. This was followed by A Show Named Fred, then by Son of Fred—which failed because Milligan had gone overboard with minimalist sets and lost the audience. But Lester showed he could deliver amazingly funny film with the 11-minute classic The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film and the full-length musical It's Trad, Dad!—two films that induced the Beatles into accepting him as director of their first film, It's a Hard Day's Night, and then of Help! Yule has much fun showing Lester improvising on the script and the Beatles inventing much of their material—George Harrison actually wrote, ``What do you call that haircut?'' and John Lennon's reply, ``Arthur.'' Later, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum let Lester work with Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Buster Keaton, and was followed by the hilarious How I Won the War (featuring John Lennon), the San Francisco farce Petulia, and The Three Musketeers and its sequel. We watch him film Robin and Marian, Superman II, Superman III and still another Musketeers sequel. Also included is the script for a scene written for Paul McCartney but then deleted from the final cut of A Hard Day's Night. A running, jumping biography that never stands still except for a final interview with Lester, now much more cautious about his projects.
Pub Date: March 21, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-390-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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