A hit.
A moving, absorbing journal of life on stage and at home.
A young (early 30s) veteran of stage (Rent) and screen (Adventures in Babysitting; A Beautiful Mind; the upcoming film adaptation of Rent), Rapp here makes an impressive debut as a writer, bringing a keen actor’s sense of detail, timing and pathos to the page. He opens with vivid descriptions of auditions, workshops and early performances of the musical Rent, with which he had become involved as an actor soon after its inception. His production log gaining momentum, he shifts abruptly yet skillfully to home in Joliet, Ill., where doctors discover a malignant tumor growing on his mother’s adrenal gland. Narratives entwine as Rapp reveals how his mother’s heartbreaking demise, his work in a major musical hit and his turbulent relationships with four men eventually, if painfully, empower his acting and enrich his life. Rapp sharply brings to life a series of inherently dramatic moments. There are the tumultuous performances of Rent, especially the one given for the parents and friends of Rent’s composer Jonathan Larson after Larson dies on the eve of the show’s explosive success. There are accounts of romantic yet tortured personal relationships. But most notably, there is the story of Rapp’s relationship with his mother. Clearly, mother and son had forged a bond after the mother divorced and as her son found work as a young actor. Still, their relationship remained tendentious, especially over the issue of Rapp’s homosexuality. Flying home on days off from Rent, Rapp eventually establishes touching rapport with his gravely ill mother. Writing with painful sensitivity of a final, wrenching farewell as he confronts her lifeless body, he reaches a deep, affecting level of personal expression.
A hit.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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