A mixed bag but worth reading. Those who do will be inspired to give Pryor’s concert films fresh screenings.
Biography of the comedic genius, anticipating the authors’ in-the-works film script on Pryor’s work and hard times.
Pryor was a careful autobiographer, as witness the revelations in his popular concert films from the early 1980s. He was also a brilliant improviser and actor who would single-handedly “populate his stages with upward of eight or ten characters who he permitted to flirt with, mock, con, love, hate, enchant, and begat each other.” The Henry brothers, one a screenwriter, the other a music producer, do not add materially to what Pryor has told us about himself, except to note that his frequent protestations that he had quit drugs were lies. Indeed, on many matters, they rely too heavily on the memoirs of Pryor’s ever-patient friend Paul Mooney. What adds value to this book is the authors’ expert sociological constructions, some of which they do not follow as closely as they might have. For instance, it is a noteworthy observation (though not original to the Henrys) that Pryor, more than any other single source, may have brought the “N-word” into common usage in popular culture; they could have explored it more. Along the way, they venture useful notes on the influence of Dick Gregory, the frequent betrayals (including Pryor’s assumption that Mel Brooks was going to cast him as the sheriff in Blazing Saddles, a good bit of which Pryor wrote), and of course, Pryor’s incessant drinking, drug use and sad demise. The book is a touch slapdash at times—the spelling is Sandy Koufax, not “Kofax”; someone from Wales is Welsh, not “Welch”; Moms Mabley never worked a room clean if she could help it—but it’s mostly insightful and often entertaining all the same.
A mixed bag but worth reading. Those who do will be inspired to give Pryor’s concert films fresh screenings.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-078-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
PROFILES
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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