by David Kaufman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2016
A warm and well-researched—though not particularly compelling—appreciation of one of the stage’s most beloved performers...
The charmed life and times of Broadway sweetheart Mary Martin (1913-1990).
Longtime theater critic Kaufman’s (Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, 2008, etc.) biography of stage star Martin will tick all the boxes for ardent fans of the performer—the author deftly summarizes her career and personal history—but those not part of the cult will find a curiously bland subject. Martin’s gift was an endearing quality, a unique ability to emotionally connect to audiences in a live setting; while a more than able vocalist, she lacked a truly distinctive vocal instrument, and her early-career onscreen forays (her attempts at movie stardom would come to naught) proved lackluster and unmemorable. Martin shone on the Broadway stage, where she capitalized on her winsome charm in storied productions of South Pacific, The Sound of Music, and, most famously, Peter Pan. Martin’s work in these roles inspired adoration, but there is precious little to dig into: the shows were masterpieces, she was excellent in them, and that’s about it. Perhaps attempting to invest dramatic stakes in the tale, Kaufman alludes to rumors of lesbian relationships between Martin and actresses Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor, but gently and without much evidence to support the claims. The author evenhandedly recounts Martin’s longtime marriage to the gay, dictatorial Richard Halliday, a difficult personality who clashed terribly with Martin’s son, the free-spirited actor Larry Hagman (the product of a previous marriage), but even here the narrative lacks any real tension or drive. Kaufman has produced an encomium rather than a page-turner.
A warm and well-researched—though not particularly compelling—appreciation of one of the stage’s most beloved performers and, on the evidence here, least interesting legends.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-03175-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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