Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.
Colorful, charismatic star of stage and screen recounts 50 years of the Hollywood life, with the assistance of veteran co-author Stadiem (Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, 1991, etc.).
After Hamilton dishes out some spicy insider information from his stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2005 (steroid use, allowing his partner to blatantly mask his lack of dancing acumen), the actor dives right into his turbulent, nomadic childhood. After his parents divorced, Hamilton’s Christian Scientist mother swiftly moved the family to Hollywood, where many years earlier she had unsuccessfully attempted a film career. The random relocations continued as she discovered better ways to live—and better men to live with. In 1950, when Hamilton was not yet 12, he was shipped off to live with his father, a bandleader in New York City. His urban “adult education” prospered by way of illicit sex with his stepmother, time spent at military school in Mississippi and a short-lived stay in Boston with his newly remarried mother. Following her from there to Washington, D.C., Acapulco and Palm Beach, he realized at an early age that he could garner attention with “the smile I had learned to use to cover all my fears.” His love of the stage took hold at Palm Beach High School, and once he was back in Los Angeles Hamilton’s career mushroomed from smaller roles into a prestigious contract with MGM. From this moment on, he drops Old Hollywood names with wild abandon. Some of the narrative reads like tabloid fodder, with Hamilton right in the middle of all the Tinseltown commotion. (The 69-year-old actor has two sons nearly 30 years apart in age.) His bountiful life has had its share of blunders, the dapper “silver fox” admits, but he is still able to “laugh at myself.”
Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4502-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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
© 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
