The eldest daughter of TV actor/writer/director/producer Michael Landon (Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, etc.) tells her side of the Landon story—and tells her father's as best she can. Wilson is the daughter of Landon's second wife, Marjorie Lynn Noe, and has eight siblings or quasi-siblings. Landon, dying of cancer at 54, expressed his regret to Wilson that he'd not been allowed by her biological father to adopt her—but that she'd always been his daughter anyway. With this book, she returns the favor by protecting and honoring Landon's memory and by showing how he was her dad even though she'd had weekend contact with her biological father during her mother's marriage to Landon—who had his problems. The son of a mentally disturbed woman, he popped pills during his early years on Bonanza and never gave up heavy use of cheap vodka. But friends and others envied his Romeo-and-Juliet tie with Marjorie, an immense lovey-doveyness that would not allow his eyes to leave her. Landon clearly was a marvelous father to all his children, and much of his home life became grist for scripts he wrote and directed for his various series. Wilson's darkest moment came with an auto accident that killed her three fellow passengers and nearly killed her, and that left her with lifelong pain and a dependency on Percodan. Her use of the painkiller got out of hand and she had to enter rehab. Another tough time came when Landon left Marjorie for his young third wife. The kids were hurt, but the younger ones recovered as part of Landon's new and growing family- -although Wilson felt whipped when Landon shrank her inheritance to much less than expected. The high points here are quite moving, especially Landon going on The Tonight Show to fight the tabloids two months before dying. Well done. (Photos—24 pp. b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-79352-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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