Frankly, my dears, it’s time to look beyond the love lives of movie stars.
Sex-obsessed biography of the man who was Rhett Butler.
Clark Gable’s father taunted his son, calling him a “sissy.” Young Clark responded by fashioning a macho-stud demeanor and projecting dad’s disgust onto the many homosexuals he met and worked with. And Bret (Joan Crawford: Hollywood Martyr, 2007, etc.) makes it clear that quite a few gays and lesbians populated Hollywood’s soundstages and swimming pools. The author tags virtually everyone who shows up here as straight, gay or bi, the majority falling into the latter two categories. Like previous accounts, this one alleges that early in his career Gable was “gay for pay” and for career advancement. He squired older women, some of them perhaps closet lesbians, and had close personal, possibly sexual relationships with a number of openly gay men. He was, as well, a serial seducer of women. Bret’s sourcing is unclear throughout; he qualifies most assertions about Gable’s sexuality with phrases like “it could be” and “it was alleged.” As for insight into the star’s films and acting, look for it elsewhere. The author lavishes far more care on the details of Hollywood’s sexual roundelays than on his flat summaries of Gable’s films, including eight unnecessary pages on the plot of Gone with the Wind. Then it’s on to the actor’s severe halitosis (repeatedly mentioned) and his suffering from phimosis, an inability to retract the foreskin of his uncircumcised penis. Neither problem kept the King from scoring big time in the bedroom. The image, craft and perhaps art that made Gable a huge star for decades receive scant notice.
Frankly, my dears, it’s time to look beyond the love lives of movie stars.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78672-093-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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