An eclectic collection that illuminates the writing processes but too often feels incomplete.
Headlined by discussions with Lonesome Dove (1985) author Larry McMurtry and Watership Down (1972) writer Richard Adams, White’s (A Florida Anthology, 2013, etc.) selection of stories contains intimate sit-downs with authors from a wide range of genres.
This collection begins with the story of Harry Crews, a hard-drinking author whose real-life escapades heavily influenced his writing, though they might appear commonplace compared with those of other, more notorious literary figures. Crews provides keen insight into his writing process and troublesome past, but, since all the interviews occurred from 1979 to1984, they can feel outdated when the conversation shifts to his works being adapted for film and television: “. Crews will refuse to acknowledge The Gospel Singer if Tom Jones is cast as planned.” That outmodedness becomes a recurring situation during other interviews, with authors such as Frank G. Slaughter and Evan Hunter, which offer little new information about the lives of their subjects. The stories are most rewarding when White and the writers engage in philosophical discourse. Interviews with poet Richard Eberhart, behavioral psychologist and utopian theorist B.F. Skinner, and religious writer Chaim Potok particularly stand out as lively and deep. White often mimics the style of his subject, which keeps the writing fresh, and no story is more captivating than his interview with Calvin Hoffman, a leading voice for the theory that Christopher Marlowe was the true author behind Shakespeare’s works. Reading like a murder mystery, Hoffman’s devoted obsession with Shakespeare’s life and Marlowe’s vaguely reported death is shrouded in debate and wholly engrossing. Other interviews, however, fail to achieve the same tension. A discussion with actor Derek Jacobi—the only nonwriter—who acted in many Shakespeare plays, immediately follows the Hoffman interview but covers previously explored territory. Likewise, interviews with poet Kofi Awoonor and McMurtry run only a few pages before rushing to their respective conclusions, leaving readers wanting more.
An eclectic collection that illuminates the writing processes but too often feels incomplete.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492296515
Page Count: 172
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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