A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.
Veteran Hollywood stuntman, dialogue coach, actor, producer and director Hinkle wryly recounts his adventures in Movieland, most notably a close friendship with James Dean.
After a spell toiling on the peripheries of the film industry, in 1955 the proud Texan and rodeo cowboy was approached by director George Stevens, who was interested in procuring Hinkle’s services for his upcoming adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Giant. Hinkle, an aspiring actor, reckoned he’d be perfect for the role of young West Texan hotshot Jett Rink, but Stevens had other ideas: He asked Hinkle to help star Rock Hudson talk like a genuine Texan cowboy. The author took the job and became fast friends with the actor cast to play Rink, a young up-and-comer who called himself Jimmy Dean. Hinkle’s anecdotes of life with Dean on the set are warm and amusing, offering an irresistibly prosaic glimpse of the elusive legend, with whom Hinkle hunted rabbits, raced cars and engaged in other hijinks. Hinkle enjoyed a sort of older-brother relationship with the star, teaching Dean to spin a rope and dress in authentic cowboy style, and welcomed the lonely actor into his family. His account of Dean’s tragic early death is freshly affecting, despite the story’s mythic familiarity. Hinkle is a garrulous storyteller—though he occasionally lays on the Texas Pride schtick a little thickly—and his memories of Elizabeth Taylor’s passionate personality and salty language, Hudson’s moody insecurity and Dean’s fierce competitiveness are good fun. After Giant, Hinkle’s career spun out in a number of improbable directions, including stunt flying, forming his own successful production company and managing motorcycle madman Evel Knievel. All of this is diverting, but the heart of the book is Hinkle’s friendship with Dean, who comes across as an uncommonly sensitive and kind young man. The anecdotes about the eventful making of Giant are Hollywood insider gold.
A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4093-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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