Greene's letters to editors, unlike those of Evelyn Waugh or Bernard Shaw, seldom trade on the author's public figure—but are most fun when they do, as when Greene wins prizes for his pseudonymous entries in newspaper contests based on parodies of Graham Greene. (He later cannibalized two of the parodies for his own work.) Greene was a former sub-editor of The Times and when ending his four-year stint there was told that, if he stayed and were patient, he might well become correspondence editor. Greene later said that if he had stayed, "my whole life would have been changed disastrously for the better." For American readers, though, he will be most readable here when defending his cuts in Shaw for Otto Preminger's film St. Joan, and when standing up for rights of British audiences to see Pygmalion when a ten-year ban on the play was put in force to keep My Fair Lady on the boards. Other lively moments arise when he takes on journalists who misquote or falsify his words during interviews (but does anyone really remember the Penelope Gilliatt brouhaha in The New Yorker?). He is most sharp-tongued about US foreign policy in Central America and the Far East. Also of interest are his bouts with censors, especially the BBC, which wanted nine cuts in his play The Complaisant Lovers. Greene took this as censorship, but the BBC said it was to bring the play in at 90 minutes broadcast time. He also often defends himself against unfair statements about his Catholicism. Many of his political letters, however, will be of small interest to American readers of his fiction. Less waspish than Waugh, less brilliant than Shaw.
Pub Date: May 1, 1990
ISBN: 0140123725
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Reinhardt/Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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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