Literate, frank, and sometimes graphic—another essential volume from an essential writer.
A veteran film critic and historian escorts us through cinema history to examine our sexual attitudes and appetites glowing in the dark.
In his latest book, Thomson, the author and editor of more than 20 books about film and TV (Television: A Biography, 2016, etc.), puts on display an array of his virtues as a writer: clear, precise language; vast knowledge of his subject (from books, screens, interviews, and friendships); an open sense of humor; and attitude. Though film history is the author’s principal interest here—and how the movies have affected our ideas about love and sex—he comments at times on contemporary issues, as well, including sexual harassment (Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey, and others) and the current occupant of the White House, whose rise to power he calls “grotesque.” As usual, Thomson pulls no punches and takes no shortcuts. His technique is to focus on specific, often iconic films—the creators, casts, and others involved—and to show how they have influenced the viewing public and the culture at large. Throughout, the author is a genial guide as he moves through the films and personalities, including, among dozens of others, Rudolph Valentino, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Jean Harlow, Tony Curtis, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman. Thomson explores not just the on-screen sexuality of his principals, but also their off-screen, “real” sexual identities. We learn a lot, for example, about who was gay, or possibly gay, and who was bisexual. We also see a lot of Weinstein-ian behavior that prevailed long before #MeToo: director Nicholas Ray having sex with the 16-year-old Natalie Wood; other dominant male figures—straight and gay—taking sexual advantage of their power. However, the author also reminds us that viewers are not innocent: We sit in the dark, watching, imagining, and enjoying the sex (he confesses to a number of his own youthful passions for film stars).
Literate, frank, and sometimes graphic—another essential volume from an essential writer.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94699-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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