A book for those who already agree with or will warm to the author’s high-minded, often elitist stance.
A memoir and artistic manifesto regarding the author’s love of highbrow, "meaningful" classical theater.
Perloff's mandate as the artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater, a classical, nonprofit theater company, is "to nurture and cultivate that which may have lasting value”—unlike popular culture, which she regards as only momentarily relevant. The author admits to being "a world-class talker” with the ability to “set a trail of words in motion and watch them quickly find their way into complete sentences, paragraphs, speeches,” which is a major flaw of the book; she writes indulgently and expansively and name-drops the many actors with whom she has worked. What is clear are Perloff's twin passions: creative development through artistic collaboration and the difficult and unique challenges women and mothers face in the theater: "how hard it is for us to be resilient in the face of a doubting culture that rarely believes we have it in us to succeed at the highest levels." The author argues vigorously for the relevance of classical theater, an art form that, contrary to mainstream productions, "managed to be at the same time metaphoric and immediate, poetic and specific, linguistic and physical, political without being didactic.” Perloff disdains even classic American drama for its "realism" and confessional and earnest qualities, and she declares that theater "exists only in relationship to audience.” Many of the author’s arguments are intellectually stimulating but likely only for a select few, and this snobbery will likely put off fans of commercial theater. When she rhapsodizes about her experience reading "the famous central Chorus of Aristophanes' The Frogs” in Greek class while studying at Stanford, lay readers may well close the cover and exit scene.
A book for those who already agree with or will warm to the author’s high-minded, often elitist stance.Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-931404-14-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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