by Christopher Robbins ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2005
Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t...
Memoir of a friendship with a gay, Irish, octogenarian filmmaker.
In the 1970s, Robbins (Test of Courage, 2000, etc.) was a scrappy free-lance journalist, deep in debt, barely able to pay his rent, who was then introduced to Brian Desmond Hurst, a leading Irish filmmaker who wanted to cap his career by making a movie about the events leading up to the birth of Jesus. “Larry Oliver” had already agreed to participate in the project. Robbins at first wanted to back off—Hurst seemed a little weird, and Robbins had never read, let alone written, a screenplay. But Hurst offered a whopping salary, and Robbins signed on. Robbins quickly figured out that Hurst had his own financial woes; he was often unable to find the cash either to pay the milkman or cover his bar tab. Even when friends and associates offered to back the movie, some psychological block prevented Hurst from moving forward. So the film was never made. Still, Robbins and Hurst traveled, and drank, and occasionally wrote. Robbins began working with his eccentric friend on his memoirs, another project that never saw the light of day. But along the way, Hurst included Robbins in a number of adventures, including friendship with (and theft from) a Russian baroness and spy. Robbins’s droll account (winner of the Saga Award for Wit, given previously to Alexander McCall Smith) also offers a glimpse into the gay subculture of pre–Stonewall England—Hurst was sometimes discriminated against by movie execs who didn’t want to work with a “bugger.” He died in 1986 and, despite a career that had included making Malta Story and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was rapidly forgotten. The filmmaker, says Robbins, “outlived his reputation”—when he died, he hadn’t made a film in two decades.
Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t have wished for a finer tribute.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-709-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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