Entertaining and occasionally moving tales from the wilds of showbiz.
One of America’s first reality stars taps his way through five decades of life on stage filled with the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Harris is best known to most readers as the first winner of Star Search and/or Liza Minnelli’s BFF, depending on whom you ask. It turns out that the pop singer has the writing chops to tell a good tale, but be prepared for a slew of name-dropping: “I lunched with Lucille Ball! I shared a dressing room with Al Green and improvised with him! I discussed playwriting backstage with Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner! I was just about adopted by Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera! I was given song ideas from Bette Midler!” And that’s just half of that paragraph. Two stories about Minnelli are more revealing about the author than the superstar. In “Promises,” Harris examines how he helped her recover from her ill-advised marriage to “The Man Whose Name Shall Go Unmentioned.” Far less whimsical is “I Know, Baby. I Know,” in which Harris plumbs the depths of his own alcoholism during a visit to Minnelli in rehab. Another, “Comfort Food,” elegantly crosses the terror of 9/11 with the author’s appearance on Oprah. When the stories leave behind the lights of Broadway, most can be very touching, as Harris recounts stories of growing up gay in rural America, the story of meeting his longtime partner, the perils of modern-day parenthood, and the tale of his childhood home burning down not once, but twice in “Drilling Without Novacaine.” There’s melancholy aplenty, but most of the stories are uplifted by Harris’ quirky sense of humor. In the cringe-inducing “I Feel, You Feel,” the author is virtually abandoned on stage by a noticeably overdue Aretha Franklin. A standout is the navel-gazing meditation “Liver,” an examination of blind optimism that ends well: “In the end, I would rather be bruised than cynical, trusting than suspicious, disappointed than apathetic.”
Entertaining and occasionally moving tales from the wilds of showbiz.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3341-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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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