The book, unlike the movie it describes, struggles at times to balance a tone of charming over cheesy. But Elwes’ case—that...
With the assistance of Layden (The Ghost Horse: A True Story of Love, Death, and Redemption, 2013, etc.), Elwes shares tales of the making of the 1987 film The Princess Bride, in which he starred in the role of Westley.
By the time Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andy Scheinman decided to make a film version of William Goldman’s book, Goldman’s screenplay adaptation had become legendary in Hollywood as an unproduced script. Robert Redford, Norman Jewison and even Francois Truffaut had all tried and failed to get the movie past development stages. Elwes gives a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie and theorizes on how an infamously unproducible script became a cult classic. The book is driven by the author’s thoughts and memories but is complemented by rich quotes featured in pop-out text boxes from Reiner, Scheinman, Goldman and other stars of the film, including Christopher Guest, Robin Wright and Billy Crystal. Elwes’ description of how Reiner’s simple stage directions helped achieve his tongue-in-check vision, or Scheinman’s thoughts on how today’s special effects may have overwhelmed and ruined the gently satirical tone of the movie, are interesting from a broad cinematic perspective. But the book is intended less for film aficionados than simply for lovers of this specific movie. As a rookie star in his first big production, Elwes often felt “like a kid at theater camp who has been suddenly plucked from the ranks of the ordinary and tossed onto a Broadway stage,” and while his observations ooze with positivity, they come across as genuine.
The book, unlike the movie it describes, struggles at times to balance a tone of charming over cheesy. But Elwes’ case—that the film has endured because it was made with a lot of heart—is made persuasively enough that readers will entertain the sentiment even if they aren’t totally convinced by it.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476764023
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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