One of those rare oral biographies that’s admiring yet still honest.
A star-studded cast comes together with relative unknowns to chat about their buddy Sean.
Shying away from the standard hagiographic strategy—dark, troubled thespian is constantly misunderstood by the dull masses and those Hollywood suits—British journalist/documentary filmmaker Kelly relies instead on a galaxy of interviewees ranging from actors Christopher Walken, Angelica Huston, and Jack Nicholson to Penn’s mother and a gaggle of his less famous friends. Son of a devoutly Catholic Irish-Italian actress and a Russian-Jewish journeyman director, Penn grew up pretty wild in Malibu, surfing, drinking, getting into trouble, and screwing around making short movies with friends like Emilio Estevez. After some hardscrabble theater work in Los Angeles and later New York, he got a major role in the 1981 film Taps. Fast Times at Ridgemont High followed soon after. His career since has hardly been a smooth upward climb: downs include the sad, crass failure of Shanghai Surprise, and his increasingly impressive work as a writer/director (The Pledge, The Crossing Guard) has not yet achieved much commercial success. Given the wealth of voices here, it’s easy for Kelly to resist the authorial urge to pontificate about the meaning to Penn’s life; instead, he lets its enjoyably random chaos wash across the page. One person after another attests to Penn’s mule-headed nature and his monkish devotion to the craft of acting, which includes such irritating-to-coworkers quirks as insisting on being referred to by his character’s name and acting rude off-camera to people he was supposed to hate on-camera. Great stories include the anecdote about Penn and some friends getting a private serenade from Jewel—until she was interrupted by a bang: the actor had just shot a rat with a laser-sighted Glock.
One of those rare oral biographies that’s admiring yet still honest.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-84195-623-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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