Eyman marshals thousands of facts, and dozens of opinions, with brio, wit and authority to create a monument worthy of the...
Acclaimed Hollywood biographer Eyman (Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, 1999, etc.) tackles his most ambitious subject: the mogul of moguls who ran MGM.
To Esther Williams he was God, to producer Michael Balcon “the unspeakable Mayer,” to Montgomery Clift a gangster on a throne. Yet the real reason it’s hard to take the measure of Louis B. Mayer (1885–1957) is not that people held such dramatically different opinions of him, but that so many people were in a position to have opinions at all. The job Mayer held for most of his working life as head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (his name was added a year after the studio was formed in 1924) brought him into contact with everyone who was anyone in Hollywood. The story of his workaholic life is the story of MGM’s most successful, indeed only successful, quarter-century, and of the talented specialists who worked for him: production chief Irving Thalberg, designer Cedric Gibbons, producer Arthur Freed. Most are long gone, but Eyman has talked to over a hundred who aren’t and supplemented their memories with exhaustive archival research. The result is less a year-by-year chronicle of the legendary mogul’s life than a biography of Hollywood’s grandest studio during its grandest era. Though Eyman is scrupulously fair in documenting Mayer’s “pit-bull aggressiveness mixed with a placating neediness,” he defends Mayer against the charges of vulgarity and philistinism, pointing out that MGM’s most characteristic films (Grand Hotel, The Wizard of Oz, The Human Comedy, An American in Paris) have dated more obviously than their counterparts at Paramount and Warner Bros. because they spoke more precisely to the audience of their time.
Eyman marshals thousands of facts, and dozens of opinions, with brio, wit and authority to create a monument worthy of the greatest studio head of them all. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-0481-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
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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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