Usually fatuous, spiteful, and superficial, here and there piquant or instructive. (41 b&w photos throughout)
A quintessential quidnunc chronicles his continent-hopping capers as photographer to the stars and the royals, as a designer of sets for Hollywood and Broadway, and as a fox in Celebrity’s henhouse.
Beaton (The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970–1980, 2003) was a skilled, imaginative artist—a photographer whose works were featured at the National Portrait Gallery, a designer whose clothing and sets enlivened My Fair Lady and Coco, a painter who sought ever to improve. But a writer? He rarely probes below epidermal depths, and any of his stunning photographs reproduced here are truly worth more than a thousand of his words. By far the best portions here deal with his involvement with the Broadway production of Coco in 1969, featuring a Katherine Hepburn he initially admires but grows to fear. Beaton provides an insider’s running commentary on the backstage bickering about colors and designs and sets and scenes—and, with surprising equanimity, writes about the negative reviews of the show, especially Clive Barnes’s shots at the very portions of the production for which Beaton was responsible. Also affecting are Beaton’s periodic laments about the break-up of his relationship with Kin, a San Francisco professor, who decides he wants to go back to California (after living with Beaton), where, Beaton complains, he fails to write with sufficient frequency. Beaton was at times a treacherous friend: he accepted the hospitality of aristocrats, plutocrats, and celebrities’ children—or socialized elsewhere with them—then returned to his quarters and waxed vicious in his diary. Noël Coward was “a fat old turtle”; Mick Jagger’s face was “a white, podgy, shapeless mess”; Vanessa Redgrave could look “quite hideous.” And so on. He writes respectfully, though, about Marianne Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jon Voight, and a few others. Vickers, leaving nothing to chance, explains in his myriad footnotes who Richard Nixon and Queen Victoria were.
Usually fatuous, spiteful, and superficial, here and there piquant or instructive. (41 b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4297-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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