Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet...
Once again, Chandler (I, Fellini, 1995, etc.) lets an acclaimed and beloved filmmaker tell his life story largely in his own words.
When he died earlier this year at the age of 95, Billy Wilder’s artistic legacy included such classics as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, all of which he directed and co-wrote. Born to German-speaking Jewish parents in an area of Austria-Hungary that's now part of Poland, Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin before becoming a screenwriter. His career in the German film industry was cut short when Hitler came to power, and he eventually wound up in the US. Although he spoke little English on his arrival, he became one of the great screenwriters of Hollywood's golden age. His films, usually written in collaboration, first with Charles Brackett, then later with I.A.L. Diamond, are noted for their sophisticated, sometimes cynical, humor and an ear for the found poetry of the American vernacular unmatched by any other filmmaker with the possible exception of Preston Sturges. Wilder was also a world-class raconteur, which proves both a strength and a weakness here. (The title, from the memorable last line of Some Like It Hot, also neatly sums up Wilder's wryly mordant worldview.) His anecdotes are fascinating and often hilarious, but many of them may already be familiar to readers of earlier accounts, most notably Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder (1999). In addition, Chandler makes only the most cursory attempt to put Wilder's work into any sort of critical context, all too often simply letting him do the talking, along with various friends and collaborators, and limiting herself to potted synopses of his films and the occasional piece of necessary exposition.
Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet memorial to one of cinema's true originals.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1709-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
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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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