The King of Tragedy is discovered behind the King of Hollywood—by the Queen of Trash Bios. In her tenth Hollywood bio, Wayne (Gable's Women, 1987; Crawford's Men, 1988; Ava's Men, 1990; Grace Kelly's Men, 1991, etc.) goes beyond paste-up to embark on self-plagiary. She makes no mention of Gable's Women and simply jumps into rewriting herself, adding clips from familiar scenes about Gable from her bios of his lovers Crawford, Gardner, and Kelly. Is this a new book? Well, maybe, but no page smells fresh. Once more we get the famous fights, the seethings and soothings, dramatized in Wayne's own dialogue, as between Gable and Crawford: ``I'm sick and tired of this Rhett business.'' ``Not if I play Scarlett. We're dynamite together.'' ``Yeah.'' ``You'll insist?'' ``Carole [Lombard] wants the part, too.'' ``Scarlett's not a blonde, for Christ's sake!'' ``I wouldn't know because I haven't read the goddamn book!'' Wayne's Gable is ``an alcoholic, a bland love, a scoundrel, an egotist, and an opportunist who hit the casting couch for a homosexual encounter with a well-known leading man to get into films.'' And he has a tragic mother-complex. The gay encounter, with a friend of gay director George Cukor, later resulted in Gable having Cukor replaced on Gone with the Wind when Gable didn't want his past dug up. But we've read this story in Gable's Women, just as we've read and reread about the star's affairs with Ava, Joan, and Grace, and about his run-in with Marilyn (in Marilyn's Men, 1992). Even Lombard's knitting of a special little sleeve for Gable lacks zip. Wayneland recycled.
Pub Date: June 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09259-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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