A compelling exploration of a beguiling film icon’s life—a significant if not quite definitive addition to the ever...
A deep dive into the model and screen legend’s glamorous but troubled life.
In the decades since Marilyn Monroe’s (1926-1962) death, our fascination with her remains strong. Her allure has sparked the imaginations of talents ranging from Andy Warhol to Joyce Carol Oates to the producers of the TV series Smash, and she has been the subject of countless biographies. In his latest book, Casillo (The Marilyn Diaries, 2014, etc.) rehashes much family material about Monroe, but he pays particularly sympathetic attention to her emotional journey. Delving into the well-known narrative points, he begins with Monroe’s unhappy and frequently abusive childhood. Dependent on a single mother who was suffering from severe mental health issues, she was frequently put into foster care and at one point abandoned in an orphanage. As Monroe blossomed into a stunningly attractive young woman, a modeling career quickly led to minor film roles and subsequent star turns in such 1950s classics as Gentleman Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. While developing into one of the most famous movie stars of her time, she increasingly struggled with deep insecurities and dependency on pills and alcohol. Her acting talent continued to expand, but by the early 1960s, her personal life was plummeting. Often feeling paralyzed by low self-esteem working in front of the camera, she often displayed erratic behavior that caused long delays on film sets. This accelerated during production of her last completed film, The Misfits, and influenced a fatal blow with her dismissal from the ill-fated Something’s Got to Give. Casillo focuses a good portion of the book on Monroe’s fragile emotional state in these remaining years. She had an obsessive fear of aging and losing her sexual appeal. While not offering much new information, the author thoughtfully re-examines the facts and myths surrounding the events leading to Monroe’s death, touching on her affairs with both John and Robert Kennedy and her continued substance abuse problems.
A compelling exploration of a beguiling film icon’s life—a significant if not quite definitive addition to the ever expanding Monroe literature.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09686-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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