Kind of a waste of time.
A tell-too-much, say-too-little collection of autobiographical essays about one woman’s B-grade brushes with stardom.
The latest from Hollywood writer and producer Wilder-Taylor falls well short of satisfying. The first two-thirds of the book deal with her many mishaps along the road to something like fame. After graduating from high school, she went to New York City with vague ambitions of becoming an actress. But her stage career began and ended in an Italian restaurant where, as a singing waitress, she demonstrated her total lack of vocal skills. In Los Angeles, she found her way as a dancing extra in a Bob Dylan-Dave Stewart music video that quickly “fell off into oblivion.” Later, Wilder-Taylor auditioned for a dating show called Studs, only to find herself paired with a man who “looked like a bisexual pirate.” Ever in search of celebrity—or at least, of a way to be near it—the author briefly drove limos for the likes of such minor screen luminaries as Lolita Davidovich and Justine Bateman. The narrative, which moves rather disconnectedly between episodes, displays even more disjointedness in the final third of the book. Wilder-Taylor, now an established figure in the entertainment industry, struggled to cope not only with the demands of her career, but also motherhood, all while trying to deal with an drinking problem that had been present since her teens. In between snarky “letters” she writes to Angelina Jolie about the actress’ too-perfect maternal image and to David Hasselhoff about their common “crazy love of booze,” the author offers maddeningly brief glimpses of real emotional poignancy in her depiction of her alcohol and codeine-dependent father and their rocky relationship. Wilder-Taylor’s often self-deprecating candor is the book’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness. While she freely provides gossipy tidbits about her life and adventures, her capacity to move beyond the superficially funny and into the meaningfully humorous is lacking.
Kind of a waste of time.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7657-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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