In his debut, Hamlin—best known for his role as Perseus in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, as well as his stint on L.A....
A comic memoir recounting the obstacles one man endured on his quest to become an actor.
In his debut, Hamlin—best known for his role as Perseus in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, as well as his stint on L.A. Law—depicts how his lifetime of debacles began at an early age. At four he urinated in the dog dish, and a few years later, wrote a book report on Mein Kampf, resulting in his removal from school. On Christmas Day 1962, his parents offered him less offensive reading material—a five-year subscription to Playboy—though this would have an equally disastrous result for the hormone-crazed youth. From Hamlin's first introduction to the female body, the memoir takes a turn, no longer focusing on the innocent trials of a prepubescent boy but rather on the litany of sexual escapades that followed the actor throughout his life. While the author’s tales of sexual encounters string the narrative together, his romps are not the focal point. Instead, Hamlin's history with drugs overpowers the other aspects of the story. Though he explains his run-ins with law enforcement in a comical manner, readers will recognize the seriousness of his crimes. The book is rampant with road trips, fraternity debacles and prison sentences, yet when these unoriginal tales are told with hackneyed phrases (“Bring it on, baby!”; “But that's another story”), readers may desire more substance. Nevertheless, Hamlin's story has its charms, and his unabashed honesty provides a clear view of a boy's life in the late-’60s and early-’70s. In one instance, he describes selling himself as a handyman in order to raise money for a road trip to Woodstock. “I highly recommend this strategy of creating an income when you're seventeen and know how to do absolutely nothing but sleep and whack off,” he writes, acknowledging his own low expectations for himself in a world that would one day require much from him.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6999-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
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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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