This is the first book by Winecoff, a graduate of the film program at UCLA, who ``grew up around the corner'' from his subject, Psycho star Anthony Perkins. Unfortunately for his career and his emotional balance, Perkins was quickly condemned to be thought of as just that, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's epochal 1960 film. Although he had a not undistinguished career on stage and actually made few horror films until relatively late in his career, Perkins would be forever identified with the knife-wielding Norman Bates. However, as Winecoff's book amply documents, that was one of his lesser problems. Perkins was the son of the famous stage actor Osgood Perkins, who died when the boy was only five. Perkins's mother, Jane, was a cold and dominating woman. The boy was sent to boarding schools, where he was generally miserable. His life was made all the more difficult by his realization that he was gay. Winecoff assiduously traces Perkins's career path—from summer stock to a premature Hollywood debut in Cukor's The Actress, to Broadway success in Look Homeward, Angel, then back to Hollywood for Friendly Persuasion and stardom. Perkins had a somewhat ambiguous marriage to Berry Berenson, which produced two children, whom he doted on. His life and work after Psycho seem to constitute a nearly unbroken downward spiral, including an escalating drug problem and culminating with his death in 1992 from AIDS. The book is the product of a tremendous amount of homework; Winecoff seems to have interviewed everyone living who ever worked with Perkins. Unfortunately, the prose is gratingly melodramatic and filled with mixed metaphors and solecisms (a play ``had flopped without a trace''). Winecoff shows little affection for most of Perkins's work, which leads the reader to wonder why why he has produced this long and tedious book. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94064-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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