by Donna McKechnie with Greg Lawrence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2006
Forty-plus dramatic years in the footlights, related in a numbing monotone.
A bland memoir from the hugely talented Broadway performer.
Born in Detroit in 1942 to a depressive war bride and a joyless Army veteran, McKechnie recognized early on in herself an all-encompassing love for theater. She was cast, at age eight, in a local production of Our Town. As a teenager, she had several productions under her belt and was teaching ballet. After running away (twice) to New York, McKechnie’s star rose as she toured the country with productions such as West Side Story. Television commercials followed in the mid-’60s and a two-year stint in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, dancing under the direction of Bob Fosse. While working on the TV variety show Hullabaloo, and then on Dark Shadows, young McKechnie enjoyed a short-lived marriage to promoter Al Schwartz. While life in L.A. depressed her, work on A Chorus Line elated her. In the spring of 1976, McKechnie’s Tony for her performance in that show was just one of nine the production received. Her second marriage, to choreographer Michael Bennett, was not only fleeting but ended badly, leaving the actress blacklisted, without so much as an audition on her schedule. A debilitating bout of rheumatoid arthritis threatened to take away her livelihood altogether, but a cleansing, holistic intervention slowly brought her back, just in time to perform in A Chorus Line in Tokyo and Paris, in the summer of 1985. Positive reviews revitalized McKechnie’s career, though clouds brought about by her mother’s death from lung cancer and Bennett’s sudden demise from AIDS hovered darkly. McKechnie too often renders her long career on stage with stale, pedestrian prose (countless sentences begin “I remember”), though she does offer charming anecdotes about legendary personalities: the classy professionalism of Aaron Spelling; the angry animosity of Ethel Merman; the hilarity of Elaine Stritch.
Forty-plus dramatic years in the footlights, related in a numbing monotone.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5520-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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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