Intimate story of Harry, Jack, Albert, and Sam Warner and how they rose from immigrant rags to Hollywood riches by founding the Warner Brothers Studio—as told by Harry's granddaughter and family archivist Sperling, who spent 11 years researching, aided by Millner and with contributions by Jack Warner Jr., Ronald Reagan, and others. Though its invented dialogue reads like fiction, this biomosaic of the Warner brothers and their studio comes off as a neat bit of storytelling, shored up with long quotes from family members, studio executives, and the talents who worked with the Warners. Jack Warner—the youngest brother, who outlived the others and who, through a swift shot of financial skulduggery, became sole brother in charge—is marked as the singing and joking villain of the piece. Benjamin Warner flees the Russian village of Krasnashiltz and arrives in New York in 1883. In 1904, his young sons fall in love with the nickelodeon business, soon buy their own projector, lease a theater, and, by 1907, form the Duquesne Amusement Supply Company for distributing films. Jack, formerly Jacob, quits school in fourth grade, brings home two dollars a week by singing in public, then is hired by his brothers to drive people out of the theater between shows with his bad voice. The studio's growth as it makes features on Poverty Row—with Jack and Sam heading production in Hollywood and Harry running the New York office as final authority—first climaxes with Al Jolson introducing talkies at the thrilling premiere of The Jazz Singer, though fun-loving brother Sam dies as Jolson opens. Harry tries to give the studio some class while vulgar Jack focuses on slam-bang movies from the headlines. Finally, the monster that is TV arises. Best pages are from Jack Warner, Jr., the son fired from the studio by his father for reminding him too strongly of the father's first wife. (Thirty-two-page photo insert)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55958-343-6
Page Count: 350
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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