An entertaining look at some giant-sized celebrity personalities.
Montreal-bred impresario Avrich (Selling the Sizzle, 2, 2005, etc.) recounts the deals that shaped his career in North America’s often volatile and always high-stakes entertainment industry.
As a child, the author knew he wanted to entertain, and his father’s advice for his young son was, “don’t blend in.” That suggestion sat particularly well with Avrich, who determined not to let his lack of a singing voice keep him off the stage, even if that meant dedicating himself to operating behind the scenes. The author writes affectionately about the warm Jewish upbringing that put him on the right path, first in advertising, then Broadway and, ultimately, Hollywood. “I promised myself that I would take my father’s passion for life and run with it,” Avrich writes, before launching into the story of an exciting career trajectory that soon had him intimately involved in the production of blockbuster plays like Phantom of the Opera and Kiss of the Spiderwoman. That same path, however, also landed him inside the shaky orbits of some of the most powerful players in show business. Legally challenged producer Garth Drabinsky (“a seductive and relentless psychopath”) looms especially large in the mix. However, Drabinsky is by no means the only outsized ego that Avrich analyzes. The author also scrutinizes Hollywood powerbrokers Lew Wasserman and Harvey Weinstein, screen legend Lauren Bacall, sensationalist scribe Dominick Dunne, and comedian David Steinberg. The author ticks off each minivignette without dishing too much dirt, but he still manages to be surprisingly compelling. Avrich laments that after completing his contentious Weinstein documentary, “asshole” critics were left wondering, “Where’s the sleaze?” This time around, the author isn’t slinging a whole lot of mud, either, but that doesn't prevent his intimate takes on subjects as diverse as Winston Churchill and Guccione from delighting with a special insider’s authenticity.
An entertaining look at some giant-sized celebrity personalities.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77041-287-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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