Compellingly introspective and revealing, despite the tendency toward overwriting.
Solidly literate but gushy memoir from the actress known for her roles on Star Trek: Voyager and Orange Is the New Black.
Mulgrew recounts her rise from a bucolic Iowa upbringing to much-in-demand thespian on the New York stage to iconic TV roles on Ryan’s Hope and Voyager. The memoir immediately sets itself apart from most other actors’ life stories, as the author’s prose can occasionally be self-consciously lapidary, the overall effect of which can alternate between stuffiness and evocative elegance. Unlike the Sisyphean plight of 99 percent of aspiring actors and actresses, Mulgrew’s rise to prominence in the acting field in the 1970s seems comparatively less fraught. She studied with Stella Adler (who told her that it would “be so easy for you to take your eye off the prize and skate into Hollywood”) in New York for a short time and performed in a few amateur productions. She then strode confidently into the office of a talent agent, and the rest was history. By her early 20s, Mulgrew had assumed the high-profile role of Mary Ryan on the much-beloved TV soap Ryan’s Hope. But it was also around this time that she became pregnant with her first child; being young and wary of her burgeoning career, she gave her daughter up for adoption. It would prove to be a decision that would haunt her for years, even though she would go on to have other children. The author also plows methodically and somewhat coldly through the many romances and marriages that did not survive her busy career and mercurial lifestyle as a stage and TV actress. But while her career is reaching its peak with her portrayal of Capt. Kathryn Janeway on Voyager, she also closed an important and long chapter in her life when she was unexpectedly reunited with her adopted daughter.
Compellingly introspective and revealing, despite the tendency toward overwriting.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33431-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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