The veteran character actor looks back on his first 10 years in Hollywood as a time of magical dreams and sobering realities.
Guttenberg has made more than 50 films since first striking out for Hollywood as a brash teen in the late 1970s. Here he ably captures that 18-year-old’s sense of awe and excitement as he began his career. First, he managed to sneak onto the Paramount lot where he promptly set up a private office and began engineering his own auditions. From there, he was soon enjoying a shvitz with Michael Landon and trading lines on set with Richard Widmark. Guttenberg has a fine ear for dialogue, and depictions of his regular calls back home to his salt-of-the-earth mom and dad are amusing and heartwarming. The fun and excitement slows a bit as his career begins to sputter. He eventually realized that no matter how much success he achieved, he would always be a hired hand, never quite sure where the next job would be. Meanwhile, multiple liaisons with assorted starlets and stalkers throughout the years get scant attention. Guttenberg isn’t interested in naming names. Explaining just how tough it’s been keeping his mug on the silver screen for all these years seems to be enough for him. The career gymnastics he has displayed adroitly leapfrogging from films like Cocoon to Three Men and a Baby are wholly entertaining on their own. Aspiring actors will surely gain keen insight into the challenges that may await them (if they’re lucky), while movie fans will be pleasantly assured that their faith in the dream factory’s ability to inspire is still warranted. An insider’s charming look at what it’s really like to be a Hollywood star.
Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-38345-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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