Madonna is renowned for reinventing herself, and the author can’t quite keep up. The overdetermined, central motif...
Journalist Victor (The Lady, 1998, etc.) has clearly spent years conducting interviews and compiling quotes from secondary sources for her examination into the life of pop-goddess Madonna.
She’s also done her best to tell a story intriguing enough to be a compelling read without resorting to tabloid-style sleaze-mongering. Despite these efforts, Victor doesn’t quite manage more than to circle her subject without ever truly capturing the woman, in the process producing little more than a prolonged Behind the Music script. The author assembles some interesting interview subjects, notably Madonna’s maternal grandmother and several of the star’s jilted lovers. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know which vignettes to condense in her fractured, sometimes repetitive chronology. After spending too much time on Madonna’s childhood, she builds up steam with an in-depth look at the performer’s rise to stardom. But when the narrative gets around to Madonna’s life after achieving celebrity, it becomes increasingly mundane; there’s little here that hasn’t been told before, and tired tales about Sean Penn and Sandra Bernhard can’t be made fresh again simply by adding exclamation marks. To Victor’s credit, she avoids the temptation to sensationalize Madonna’s numerous sexual exploits, exploring the star’s erotic liaisons, lesbian affairs, and abortions in a matter-of-fact way. And in a few instances, the intimate details Victor reveals—about Madonna’s mentor Christopher Flynn, ex-lover Carlos Leon, and current husband Guy Ritchie—show great insight into the singer’s public persona. Yet in all the time Victor spends explaining why Madonna wanted to be a star, and what people helped her become a star, she never adequately explores what Madonna actually became famous for: singing.
Madonna is renowned for reinventing herself, and the author can’t quite keep up. The overdetermined, central motif here—Madonna as Eva Perón—is already outdated.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019930-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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