by Andrew Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007
Drivel about a driveler.
The superficial life of the superficial author of all those superficial, lubricious and extraordinarily popular sleaze-fests of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, when ghost writers replaced the dying doyen of the “dirty novel.”
Wilson (Beautiful Shadow: The Life of Patricia Highsmith, 2003, etc.), hasn’t come up with much here. From an early age, Harold Robbins (born Rubin) gleefully lied about his life, inventing episodes and characters as facilely as he did later at his typewriter. So his biographer was forced to look at public records like census data and high-school attendance sheets, to conduct interviews with survivors (neither of Robbins’ two daughters offers much here) and to wax creative. For example, Wilson begins each chapter with a Robbinsian passage along the lines of “next to having sex, driving a cool car was one of the greatest pleasures of his life” and generally ends with a brisk, “keep-on-reading” sentence such as “but even fiercer sex and censorship battles lay ahead.” This ludic silliness aside, Wilson settles for skating along the admittedly high-gloss surface of Robbins’ life. Yes, his was a Horatio Alger–style tale; Robbins actually rose from stock boy to pen The Carpetbaggers and other lucrative titles. And, yes, the text makes it patent—and ultimately rather dull—that Robbins liked sex. Lots of it. Wilson tries hard to establish that it was women the author liked, not the services they provided, but after witnessing some of Robbins’ escapades and “preferences” (prostate massages are among the milder ones), readers may well want to head for the shower. The man could sell books, though: 750 million or so, which for a while provided him with villas, yachts, fast cars and fast lanes and accommodating (young) women. Massive debts and a wheelchair, however, were his ultimate fate.
Drivel about a driveler.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-008-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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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