Appealing mostly to film buffs—but certainly useful for drag queens. (8 pp. color illustrations, not seen, b&w...
A former costumer who knew the doyenne designer late in her career pens an “official” bio that corrects some of her autobiographical fancies.
Born in 1897 (she said 1907), Edith Head was a slightly cross-eyed, noticeably strong-willed little lady given to occasional prevarication and, at odd times, pinching undeserved acclaim. With her trademark horn-rimmed shades and false bangs, she was the best-known Hollywood costume designer from the days when Clara Bow wore ankle socks with high heels through the zenith of the studio system until her last assignments designing for Miss Piggy and dressing Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Through the years, she had only two facelifts and only two husbands (self-indulgent Mr. Head and devoted art director Bill Ihnen). As drawn by Chierichetti, her life seems a bit dreary, especially considering the divas and directors with whom she worked. The author describes costumes and explains how fabric, color, and line were marshaled to camouflage the physical flaws of screen goddesses. Dorothy Lamour “had round shoulders and massive buttocks and thighs”; Barbara Stanwyck’s “waist was long and her buttocks flat until they jutted out like a shelf”; and Bette Davis “had several serious problems: bowed legs, very round shoulders, and a long and broad neck. Worst of all were her breasts, which hung almost to her waist.” Also featured: Mae West, Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and a large supporting cast. The journeyman text, basted together with movie titles and appliquéd with bust pads, decks out the life of a woman, skilled at studio politics, who craved credits. Head won eight Academy Awards, and her respectful biographer insists that she really could design and draw well. Nevertheless, he depicts a bleak life.
Appealing mostly to film buffs—but certainly useful for drag queens. (8 pp. color illustrations, not seen, b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: March 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019428-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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