Biographer and novelist Dewey (Marcello Mastroianni, 1993; Reasonable Doubts, 1991) offers a voluminous, highly intelligent look at one of the richest and most complex of Hollywood star personas, not incidentally, one of the industry's most beloved actors. Intriguingly, as Dewey ably demonstrates, Stewart is one of those actors who—thanks to generations of comedians and impressionists—we think we know cold but whose work is continually surprising. Ironically, Stewart had the kind of upbringing that people identify with his film characters: He was raised in Indiana, Penn., a small town in the middle of the state. His father, Alex, was a dominating personality, owner of a large hardware store, one of the town's most successful businesses. It was Alex who determined that his only son would follow his path to the Mercersburg Academy and Princeton. Alex was less than thrilled when Jimmy developed more of an interest in theater than in his chosen field, architecture, but the father was also shrewd enough to give him his opportunity to fail. Needless to say, he didn't. Stewart's rise was swift, moving like lightning from summer stock to Broadway to Hollywood and stardom. Dewey, as interested in the work as he is in the life, examines each of Stewart's films in considerable detail and with real acumen. Nor does he neglect Stewart's private life; he is utterly frank but never titillating about the actor's affairs with Norma Shearer, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, and Olivia De Havilland. Also very astute is the analysis of Stewart's career choices, and the detailed recounting of his distinguished record as a bomber pilot and squad commander during WW II is downright moving. Dewey describes everything with a workmanlike prose that may not sing, but it hums nicely. A model of how to do a serious but entertaining Hollywood biography; Dewey never loses sight of the work, which is what makes Stewart important in the first place. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57036-227-0
Page Count: 521
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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