A dramatic, psychologically astute biography of the troubled sex symbol and star of such classics as Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch. Leaming’s (Katharine Hepburn, 1995, etc.) research is extensive and innovatively interpreted in this unusual biography, but she is bent on telling Marilyn’s story in a set, idiosyncratic way. This is both the great strength and weakness of her book. As a single, authoritative account, it cannot stand: Leaming omits too many telling details. Marilyn’s childhood, for example, is hurried through in a handful of pages. But as a portrait of the star’s conflicted, complicated nature and of those around her, this account is first-rate. Marilyn first landed in Hollywood as a “party girl,” a wanna-be starlet, who traded sex for possible career advancement. She had some small successes, until she cleverly promoted herself into a breakthrough role. Fame then came almost instantaneously. But Marilyn was increasingly unable to handle its demands. Making movies came to terrify her, and drugs, alcohol, and on-set acting coaches could do little to assuage her fears. The caddish, self-serving behavior of many of those around her did little to help. And her suicide at 36 is all too understandable here. Beyond her acute insights into Marilyn’s psyche, Leaming offers extensive acid-tipped portraits of those around her. Drama coach Lee Strasberg uses Marilyn to build up his prestige, regardless of the effects on her career or well-being. And second husband playwright Arthur Miller is a weak, self-justifying, egocentric who badly fails Marilyn. It’s indicative of the eccentricity and ingenuity of this account that Miller’s friendship/rivalry with the director Elia Kazan (another lover of Marilyn) occupies a central narrative position. Odd, but with a touch of genius. (32 paghes b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-517-70260-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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