by Dominic Dromgoole ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2007
A don’t-miss for Shakespeare lovers.
The artistic director of London’s Globe Theatre offers an insightful and intimate account of his lifelong devotion to the Bard.
Well aware of the vast corpus of Shakespearean scholarship, Dromgoole explains that his humble half-inch addition centers on how he’s “stumbled, shambled and occasionally glided through a life with Shakespeare as a guide.” It wouldn’t be a stretch to read this memoir’s rather chummy title as a gentle thumbing of the nose at the more formal, reserved and esoteric studies that dominate the Bard studies landscape. Dromgoole recounts with great warmth and fondness how his parents impressed the value of drama and poetry upon him at an early age, engendering a love for blank verse and the subtle complexities of human character manifested throughout the Complete Works. “From the very first moment I read Shakespeare,” he writes, “I knew I was peeping into the private souls of others.” Tackling favorite passages in short vignettes often hovering around some more or less significant life event, Dromgoole persuasively affirms Shakespeare’s ethereal humanity (“His specialty is the non-heroes, the confused, the human, the scrappy and the messy”) and reveals his own affinity for that behind-the-scenes directorial world between text and stage. While many scholars seek to hide the personal underpinnings of critical insights, Dromgoole trumpets his to great effect, recounting with humor and humility various turns of fate that led to his present understanding of both Shakespeare and himself. This charming memoir also sheds light on the meaning of theatre and offers useful advice for actors and directors alike.
A don’t-miss for Shakespeare lovers.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933648-46-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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