by Michael Sragow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2008
Scholarly, impassioned and riveting—a dandy corrective to an undervalued legacy and an immersive trip through a vanished era...
The life and career of a protean figure from Hollywood’s early days.
The present obscurity of Victor Fleming (1889–1949) doesn’t reflect the extent of his influence and achievements, suggests Baltimore Sun film critic Sragow (editor: James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, 2005, etc.). Displaying an early fascination with and facility for things mechanical, the California native occupied himself with automobiles before devoting his energies to photography, which led him to work as a cinematographer and director for MGM. Sragow authoritatively discourses on Fleming’s strengths as a filmmaker, analyzing the director’s knack for conveying the kinetic excitement of what were, after all, moving pictures, his ease with a diverse range of genres and his deft touch with actors. Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Jean Harlow were among those who developed much of their iconic personae through their associations with Fleming. Sragow provides ample evidence that his male stars incorporated the director’s mystique into their own on-screen identities, quoting family members and colleagues who inevitably described Fleming as an uncommonly charismatic man’s man: a sportsman, gentleman and irresistible catnip to the ladies, including lovers Clara Bow and Ingrid Bergman. (He directed Bergman in Joan of Arc, a punishing project and critical flop that may well have lead to his premature death.) Fleming’s most famous accomplishment is his miraculous 1939 double-header. After The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind foundered in early going with their original directors, he stepped in and stewarded two of cinema’s all-time classics to the screen despite impossibly difficult technical demands, studio politics and temperamental talent. The section on these two films alone, filled with backstage gossip and expert insight into the methods of Golden Age studio filmmaking, is worth the price of admission, but the rest of Sragow’s meticulously researched and engrossing history of this largely forgotten great director is a must for any serious movie fan.
Scholarly, impassioned and riveting—a dandy corrective to an undervalued legacy and an immersive trip through a vanished era of popular entertainment.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-40748-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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