As a more in-control memoir, this could have been a rich gold mine about Hollywood legends and lore.
Inside the chaotic Hollywood of the 1950s.
Social iconoclast Sigal (Emeritus, Journalism/Univ. of Southern California; Hemingway Lives! (Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today), 2013, etc.) mined his early years as a leftist in novels like Going Away (1961). Here, he returns to this rich autobiographical well with a gonzo memoir about his life in the ’50s as a talent agent (“flesh peddler, ten-percenter, shark”) at the prestigious Sam Jaffe Agency in Los Angeles. The book opens with a reckless, chaotic pace in rambling, scattered, and jumpy prose describing the 25-year-old Sigal losing his job as a movie gofer. The narrative eventually settles down, but the book’s episodic, digressive structure, punctuated with movie and actor references, makes it a messy read, a never-ending litany of having clients, losing clients, and getting them back. All in a day’s work. Keep those commissions coming in. The back story is the McCarthy Hearings and the Commission’s unrelenting pursuit of getting Hollywood folks to turn on each other: “Informers rule my Hollywood.” Even Sigal was being pursued by FBI agents to give names: “Every nerve end tells me to get out before I make a splendid mess of things.” The agency boasted a spectacular client list—e.g., Jack Palace, Richard Burton, Ginger Rogers, Peter Lorre—and Sigal’s job was to hobnob with them, talk shop, promise them a role they probably wouldn’t get. They did help a number of blacklisted actors and writers. Numerous profiles and anecdotes are scattered about, some insightful, some just icky. Out drinking one evening at the Beverly Wilshire hotel with Sam Jaffe, Humphrey Bogart, Sheree North (“our bid against Marilyn Monroe’s increasingly fragile stardom”), and Louella Parsons (“queen/matriarch of vipers”), Sigal recounts how Parsons started “pissing, hugely, drunkenly, in her pants.”
As a more in-control memoir, this could have been a rich gold mine about Hollywood legends and lore.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59376-657-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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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