A captivating tour of a lawyer’s encounters with creative genius.
An attorney reflects on a life working with immensely talented clients, the result of his magnetic attraction to inventive artists, in this memoir.
Curto was “born into the Golden Age of lawyerdom”—New York City in 1936—and enjoyed a career at least sparked by a measure of luck. While attending the New York Law School, the dean, Daniel Gutman, asked the author if he was related to a friend with the same name. Curto was not, but as a consequence of that brief exchange, he was then known to the dean, a relationship that ultimately led to his first legal position at Buhler, King & Buhler. The firm represented a “roster of star clients,” among them Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau. That early professional experience turned out to be decisively influential, and his career became driven by a profound attraction to creatively fertile types. That allurement is the thematic spine of this memoir: “All these stories have a common thread, which was unseen to me as I was living through them. The thread is the unique individual whose goals captured my imagination and compelled me to support them. It was these people who have defined my legal life.” The author’s remembrance is structured around these wide-ranging encounters and features anecdotes about an eclectic group, including author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, film star Linda Lovelace, football player Freeman McNeil, and journalist Harrison Salisbury.
Curto writes with admirable lucidity—even potentially forbidding questions about legal technicalities are rendered fully accessible to the layperson. While the author’s vivid stories focus on celebrities, it is not their fame per se that sets them apart for Curto—this remembrance is not the expression of infatuation with stardom. In fact, the author poignantly limns an homage to creativity in all its forms: “Simply stated, I was attracted to these special people whom I saw as ‘creators,’ fashioning their own worlds. I have always thought that artists and entrepreneurs, like God, create, while explorers and scientists discover. The difference to me is profound.” Furthermore, some of the tales the author relates intersect with grand world history. In one of the most memorable of his anecdotes, Curto “played a pivotal role in a high-risk, international scheme that secretly conveyed the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the West,” specifically two literary classics, The First Circleand The Gulag Archipelago. Despite Curto’s obvious success and talent, this is an astonishingly unpretentious work, free of any self-congratulation. The author’s abiding aim is to highlight the virtues and accomplishments of others—his principal role is as a kind of witness to greatness. This is a breezy read that delivers more entertainment than edification, and doesn’t challenge readers deeply. In addition, many of the luminaries discussed in the book will be obscure to a younger readership. Almost no one born after, say, 1980, will be familiar with singer/songwriter Harry Chapin. But since the memoir is about the author’s serendipitous encounters with innovative genius, that familiarity hardly matters; the point isn’t to gawk at the glitterati, but rather to appreciate the nebulous wellsprings of creative fecundity. Curto’s reminiscence is a delightful experience, easy though intriguing, a rare literary combination.
A captivating tour of a lawyer’s encounters with creative genius.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781631959059
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Onward Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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