Entertaining and thoughtful observations bring The Redhead into sharp focus. (16-page photo insert, 15 additional photos in...
Canny critic and cultural historian Kanfer (Serious Business, 1998, etc.) brings a bemused attitude and a keen knowledge of show business to a tale that’s becoming as familiar as an I Love Lucy rerun.
Back again we go to Lucille Ball’s early days in Jamestown, New York, followed by her youthful sorties to Manhattan and work as a model. An agent’s tip sent her to Hollywood, where she toiled first as a featured extra in musicals, then as the lead in some B-plus films, none of them bringing the kind of stardom reached by rival RKO contract player Ginger Rogers. It took a tiny, black-and-white TV screen and the role of housewife Lucy Ricardo to bring Ball success and, eventually, a place alongside Chaplin and Keaton as a comic icon. On the set, the woman behind the sweet, goofy image was a hellion. She tore off Vivian Vance’s eyelashes, kicked husband Desi in the groin (several times), and gave Richard Burton line readings, prompting Mrs. Burton to label Miss Ball “Miss Cunt.” Off the set, Desi retaliated with compulsive gambling, constant boozing, and serial adultery, often with prostitutes. His professional judgment, however, remained shrewd and unerring. Long after he and Ball divorced, he advised her not to star in the film version of the stage hit Mame. She ignored the insight and took the part, stumbling into the sad last act of her career with a damaging flop. A second, comfortable marriage to comic Gary Morton, some quality time with her children, and the usual round of testimonial affairs brought a measure of happiness to the end of a turbulent, perhaps even an unsatisfying life.
Entertaining and thoughtful observations bring The Redhead into sharp focus. (16-page photo insert, 15 additional photos in text)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41315-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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