by Violet Ramis Stiel ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018
A touching homage to a beloved father and a sufficiently amusing tribute to a comedy legend, but it’s less compelling as a...
The daughter of legendary filmmaker Harold Ramis (1944-2014) chronicles her wild Hollywood upbringing and close relationship with her father.
Even in the pre-internet era, having a permissive and free-wheeling celebrity parent could be challenging, as Stiel proves in detailing her youthful rebelliousness, drug use, and promiscuity. There were, however, obvious advantages as well, ranging from the opportunity to hang out with legendary actors in exotic locations to financial support that enabled a directionless young woman to eventually find her way in the world. By turns frank and fawning when assessing her extended family’s ability to navigate the perils of public life, the author’s affection for her dad, a beloved figure in Hollywood, dominates the narrative. She joins the #metoo movement by (gently) chiding her father for some of the more questionable scenes in his movies and, more movingly, by sharing her own story of abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend at age 9. While there are some juicy nuggets of gossip sprinkled throughout—the most shocking being the revelation that Harold Ramis was the father of Clueless director Amy Heckerling’s daughter—fans looking for new insight into the two-decade rift between Ramis and Bill Murray that followed the completion of Groundhog Day or behind-the-scenes Ghostbusters secrets will be disappointed. The book closes with a sobering account of the director’s long bout with vasculitis, an ordeal his wife kept under wraps in hopes of preserving his ability to return to work if he recovered, depriving his family of support from the entertainment community when they needed it most. After his death, Ramis received an outpouring of love, though the author struggled to come to grips with his passing even as she focused on raising her own children.
A touching homage to a beloved father and a sufficiently amusing tribute to a comedy legend, but it’s less compelling as a memoir.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1787-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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