Film star Williams reveals all, including how every hair and eyelash remained in place during the spectacular water ballets that were the core of most of her movies. The 1940—50 Williams’s films, like Neptune’s Daughter, Thrill of a Romance and Million Dollar Mermaid, are featured on cable television’s movie channels, so a younger generation of viewers is familiar with the signature splashing fountains, corps de bathing beauty, and spectacular Esther Williams smile. Here’s a description of how those effects were achieved (oil and Vaseline for the hair; the smile was her own), as well as tales about the star’s four marriages, several affairs, three children, and coming of age as a contract player in the MGM “finishing school,” along with Lana Turner, Katharine Hepburn, June Allyson, and Judy Garland. The Esther Williams films, as bland and predictable as the plots were, were big moneymakers. Only 18 years old when she signed with MGM, she had already been in the Olympics, where she swam fast, and a star of Billy Rose’s Aquacade, where she swam “pretty.” Straightforward and unpretentious, she understood that it was the wet Williams that drew people to her films. She developed increasingly complicated routines (precursors of synchronized swimming) and did her own sometimes dangerous stunts—she once broke three neck vertebrae in a diving sequence. As her career tapered off in the mid-'50s, she found that her second husband had lost or gambled away virtually all the money she'd earned in the water. Unhappy and confused, she took LSD (overseen by a doctor); it was like “instant psychoanalysis” and enabled her next marriage, to actor Fernando Lamas, although uneven, to last for 22 years until his death. Now happily married to husband number four, she heads a bathing suit firm. With the help of L.A. media critic Diehl, this is written with humor and a sense of proportion that leaven the usual movie star bio. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85284-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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