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EMPIRE OF DREAMS

THE EPIC LIFE OF CECIL B. DEMILLE

Engrossing and comprehensive—an essential text for readers interested in the history of movies.

Palm Beach Post books editor Eyman (Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer, 2005, etc.) presents the truly epic life of director Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) in grand style, befitting the great man, who, in addition to helming some of the most iconic movies of all time, did as much as anyone to establish Hollywood as the world’s filmmaking center.

Both an autocratic, politically conservative martinet and generous, tolerant paterfamilias, DeMille bestrode early Hollywood as a colossus, employing a genius for spectacle and an instinct for headlong narrative drive to make movies that continue to beguile and amaze. The author charts DeMille’s amazing professional course with justifiable awe. The tyro apprenticed with legendary theatrical David Belasco, from whom he gleaned the mechanics of visual spectacle; began what would become the Paramount movie studio in a barn with fellow strivers Samuel Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky; mastered the art of filmmaking with stunning speed; and directed a series of mammoth productions—including The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings (1927), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)—that mesmerized audiences and remain touchstones in the history of film. Eyman’s copious research, including interviews with DeMille’s contemporaries and many excerpts from the director’s personal correspondence, reveals a playful, witty, restless personality, fully aware of his foreboding image and willing to poke fun at it. There is much compelling material on his complicated rivalry with older brother William, a writer and sometime collaborator, and on his relationships with his wife, children and mistresses. Better still are accounts of the productions of his key films, rife with amusing anecdotes (DeMille’s hatred of diffident actor Victor Mature is a hoot) and fascinating insights into the sheer physical and aesthetic mechanics that went into realizing his oversized visions for the screen. DeMille’s controversial political legacy—he was no friend of unions or communists—receives a balanced and informative treatment, completing a fully dimensional portrait of a protean American artist.

Engrossing and comprehensive—an essential text for readers interested in the history of movies.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-7432-8955-9

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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