Those with fond memories of the author’s wholesome movies and TV shows may take pleasure in this dose of good cheer; others...
In this follow-up to his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business (2011), song-and-dance man Van Dyke relishes his approaching 90th birthday and shares some tips for readers on reaching and enjoying that venerable age.
Best known for Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, and the Dick Van Dyke Show, the still-energetic actor, aided here by Gold (co-author, with Billy Ray Cyrus: Hillbilly Heart, 2013, etc.), presents not so much a memoir as a collection of sprightly, scattered essays, a few poems, some correspondence with a TV reviewer, one raunchy limerick, and a fair number of platitudinous to-do and not-to-do lists. One chapter, featuring his report card rating of significant events since his birth in 1925, results in some odd juxtapositions: Van Dyke seeing Al Jolson in a “talkie” in 1930 (The Jazz Singer) is followed by the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (“The country…needed a leader, someone to believe in, and FDR was the man”). Both years receive an A. Van Dyke’s boyhood, marriages, career, bout with alcoholism, health problems: all touched upon but not explored, for this is determinedly upbeat stuff. If the secrets to a long life are good genes and a good attitude, the author appears to have been blessed with both, plus the important factor of good luck. Some celebrity name-dropping is inevitable in a showbiz memoir, but here it is fairly low-key. A late chapter featuring a conversation with longtime friend Carl Reiner would have been a fitting way to wrap up this offering on aging well, but unfortunately, Van Dyke cannot resist concluding this account by tacking on more forgettable platitudes.
Those with fond memories of the author’s wholesome movies and TV shows may take pleasure in this dose of good cheer; others not so much.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60286-296-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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