The author’s affection for his principals permeates all, brightening the dark corners and dulling the jagged edges.
Veteran journalist de Visé (co-author, with Su Meck: I Forgot to Remember, 2014) returns with a plethora of memories about actors Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, who propelled The Andy Griffith Show to enormous popularity in the 1960s.
As the author reminds us, the show about rural Mayberry remains in the popular culture: it’s never been off the air, he writes, and Mount Airy, North Carolina, continues to profit from fans’ visits and its annual “Mayberry Days.” De Visé follows a traditional dual biography format, alternating chapters about his principals at first and then blending their stories later on: birth to death to interment to afterglow. He does little to conceal his own affection for the performers, writing about “the magic that could unfold” between the two and how Griffith, despite “whatever drama might be playing out at home…remained an impeccable professional on the set.” For many readers, this will become grating. The author doesn’t neglect the dark side of the story, though he hardly emphasizes it. Both Griffith and Knotts married three times, and both had what de Visé winkingly calls a wandering eye. Griffith drank heavily and battled physically with his first wife, and Knotts partied hard. Griffith also had an envious streak: Knotts won five consecutive Emmys on the show; Griffith won zero. We follow the rise of their careers—early on, Knotts was a ventriloquist—their meeting on the set of No Time for Sergeants, and their fast friendship, which waxed and waned and waxed again. De Visé often tells us a bit about specific episodes and about the other players in the productions (with some emphasis on Jim Nabors), and he chronicles the tougher post-Mayberry years that, for Griffith, terminated with his success on his show Matlock, which ran from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Knotts had later success in low-budget films and with touring theatrical productions.
The author’s affection for his principals permeates all, brightening the dark corners and dulling the jagged edges.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4773-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
