Two thumbs up for this engrossing, sometimes shocking, memoir of life as a child actor during the silent-movie era. The real-life tale of Baby Peggy makes the fictional Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? seem tame in comparison. Discovered in 1921 at the ripe old age of 19 months, Cary (Hollywood Children, 1978, etc.)—then known as Baby Peggy—quickly became one of Hollywood's most popular stars. By the age of five, she'd made 150 comedy two- reelers and a handful of features, earning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. By the time she was six, her fame had peaked, and a reasonably successful vaudeville tour and several adolescent comeback attempts did little to stop her slide into penurious anonymity. As former child actor Paul Peterson once observed, ``Fame is a dangerous drug and should be kept out of the reach of children.'' In Baby Peggy's case, fame should also have been kept away from her parents. Backstage parents from hell, they insisted on closely controlling every aspect of her life (her father, a cowboy, believed in raising children the way you would break a horse). But their own lives soon spiraled into chaotic excess as they freely spent her substantial wealth on themselves. What money remained was stolen by an unsavory assortment of relatives and managers. Soon, in the depths of the Depression, there literally was nothing left, and the family was forced to rely on charity. It was only the independence of adulthood that gave Cary the ability to finally break free from her parents and her old identity and go on to put together a reasonably normal life as a bookseller and writer. Her story drags a little here, but considering the suicides, serial marriages, and disastrous addictions that have afflicted so many former child stars, normalcy in itself is a remarkable achievement. Hollywood memoirs just don't get any better than this. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14760-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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