A graceful, surprisingly tender account of a life lived at the edge of fame.
The “too ordinary” member of a famous Hollywood family recalls her unusual childhood.
By the time she was 16, Huston had already swum with Jack Nicholson, roller-skated with football legend Jim Brown and looked into the legendarily violet eyes of Marlon Brando. Unshakably level-headed, she decided they weren’t violet at all, but rather “bluey-gray.” Her refusal to mythologize the “special” people, including her movie-star sister, Anjelica, sets her book apart from the usual Hollywood memoir. The many brushes with fame came courtesy of her father’s family—the Hustons have produced three generations of Oscar winners—but they came at a price. Born to ballerina Ricki Soma, who was killed in a car accident when Allegra was only four, the author eventually learned that famed director John Huston was not her real father. Her story is about finding her place within this glamorous family, where she was too often an afterthought to the monumentally self-absorbed adults charged with raising her. She reconstructs memories of her mother and connecting with her biological father and his other children. A stunning amount of family drama surrounded her—serial adultery, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse—too much really for a child to bear, but Huston manages to make quiet sense of it all, weathering an emotional neglect that might have destroyed a weaker woman. By 21 she had completed an Oxford degree and embarked on a career in writing and publishing. The final, moving chapter jumps ahead a few years as the author brings together most of the important people in her life to celebrate the christening of her child. The confusion, hurt, jealousy and anger appear to have receded in favor of admirable compassion.
A graceful, surprisingly tender account of a life lived at the edge of fame.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5157-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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