A vapid, hulking doorstopper of a self-tribute.
Immigrant muscleman, action-movie star and former California governor pumps himself up.
In what reads more like a 650-page annotated résumé than a dishy celebrity memoir, the life story of Schwarzenegger (The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding, 1999, etc.) seems to have been penned by his soulless celluloid alter ego, the Terminator. Born in Austria the son of a card-carrying Nazi, the author began idolizing bodybuilders as a youngster. After a slapstick-filled stint as a tank driver in the Austrian army, Schwarzenegger dove headfirst into the world of bodybuilding, flexing and posing his way to the Mr. Universe title by the time he was 21. He then invaded America. From here, the author drags us through his version of the American dream: the endless weight training, real estate deals, political suckups and bad movies; the Humvee and private jet; his affair with Amazon man-hunter Brigitte Nielsen and rivalry with Sly Stallone; his love for Richard Nixon, his penchant for saying “outrageous” (read: stupid) things and his pathological zeal for self-promotion, and much more. Schwarzenegger documents his one-man Hollywood takeover in a blur of name-dropping and efficiently adds up the profits from each of his movies. By 2010, in addition to being a washed-up actor, the author was also the dubious mastermind behind the flashy culinary failure of Planet Hollywood and a lame-duck conservative ex-governor with record-low approval ratings. But just when it seemed like he was out of the spotlight, Schwarzenegger stirred up some saucy domestic drama, admitting to his wife that he impregnated the family housekeeper in 1996. Yet the iron-willed author admits to few imperfections and apologizes for little.
A vapid, hulking doorstopper of a self-tribute.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6243-6
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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