Readers may feel vaguely gratified that an apparently nice person made it through a difficult period, but it’s hardly...
A dull, inconsequential account of an affable slab of beefcake’s medical troubles.
Sorbo, best known for his starring role in the hit TV program Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, recounts the catastrophic effects of an aneurysm and a series of strokes on his life and career. At the height of his stardom, the conspicuously healthy, clean-living actor suffered a bizarre and statistically unlikely health crisis that left the him persistently weak and dizzy, plagued by migraines and vision loss and unable to maintain his muscular physique or even swing a prop sword on the set of the show. Sorbo is candid about the hopelessness and resentment that characterized his slow recovery, his frustration with contradictory medical advice and holistic therapies of varying effectiveness and the stress his condition placed on his new marriage. Unfortunately, the author, at least on the evidence here, is such a resolutely bland personality—a middle-of-the-road guy in temperament, taste and sensibility—that it is difficult to muster much interest in his predicament. His anecdotes about life on the set of Hercules are flavorless and mild, his observations on love, family and the capriciousness of fate banal and his regular-guy persona precludes any surprising, salacious or otherwise interesting revelations about his idyllic upbringing as a healthy young jock or his relatively smooth ascension to cult stardom. Sorbo’s medical problems, while clearly devastating to the author and his family and friends, are not the stuff of high drama; he was knocked down, felt lousy for a period and slowly recovered.
Readers may feel vaguely gratified that an apparently nice person made it through a difficult period, but it’s hardly compelling reading.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-82036-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
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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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