An informative, engaging life of a film icon.
A lively biography of a lauded actor.
Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) and his wife Mary Pickford (1892-1979) reigned as Hollywood royalty in the 1920s, when she was “America’s Sweetheart,” and he, the “top male star of his generation,” was featured in dozens of movies, notably Robin Hood and The Mark of Zorro. Although film historians have largely ignored Fairbanks, Goessel, in this hefty, well-researched biography, defends Fairbanks’ reputation as one of the most significant stars of his time. Besides a prolific acting, directing, and producing career, he co-founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and United Artists; “innovative, fearless, and deep pocketed,” he was an early backer of Technicolor. Goessel chronicles his ardent romance with Pickford and his “bromance” with Charlie Chaplin, who was such a close friend that he had his own bedroom at the couple’s estate, Pickfair. Though he traded on his suave looks and athleticism, Fairbanks was also hardworking and quickly achieved success, attracting crowds of fans wherever he appeared. When he and Mary arrived in Copenhagen, for example, they were greeted by mobs so large that they disrupted tramway service. In 1927, though, dogged by rumors of infidelity, their marriage began to unravel. Each had affairs, and they reunited, separated, and finally divorced in 1936. By then, however, Fairbanks’ fame had plummeted; neither he nor Mary flourished in the age of talkies, whose advent Goessel examines in detail. For Fairbanks, talkies ended “the romance of motion picture making.” Partly, Goessel argues, the fault lay with the studios, which did not know what to do with the new technology nor how to incorporate sound to enhance actors’ performances and plot. Fairbanks married English model and socialite Sylvia Ashley, but, Goessel believes, loved, and longed for, Mary. He died of a heart attack in 1939. Mary, who had been an alcoholic even during their marriage, deteriorated over the next four decades.
An informative, engaging life of a film icon.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-404-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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