by Donald Spoto ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1997
Prolific celebrity biographer Spoto (Rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean, 1996, etc.) offers an uncritical portrait of the three-time Oscar winner, who epitomized both Hollywood stardom at its most luminous and, for a time, career-hobbling scandal. The author interviewed Bergman in the 1970s and remained an acquaintance until her death in 1982; in addition, he spoke to many family members and colleagues, and he is admirably thorough about the facts. Bergman's childhood was marked by many family deaths, and her early vocation for the theater was quickly diverted to film: By age 22, in 1937, she was the most popular actress in Sweden, and inevitably she was sought out by Hollywood (Spoto rather hurries over Bergman's detour to shoot a film in Nazi Germany in 1938, assuring the reader that she later felt guilty about it). In America, Bergman instantly hit with films like Intermezzo, Casablanca, and Gaslight. Unhappily married to a domineering Swedish doctor who acted as her de facto agent, Bergman had affairs with, among others, photographer Robert Capa and director Victor Fleming. But she was perceived publicly as a model of rectitude until, in 1949, she became pregnant by Roberto Rossellini and relocated to Italy. The ensuing public outcry kept her out of American films for the next seven years: Spoto captures the puritanical fervor of the time, when Bergman was denounced in the Senate as a ``free-love cultist.'' But Hollywood forgave her, and she was universally beloved thereafter. Or so implies Spoto, who is so evidently so besotted by her character and her craft that his analyses tend to be uninformative: ``Ingrid always approached a role simply and without affectation, then went away quietly, memorized the lines and returned—having at some point simply understood.'' Spoto's ardor for his subject, although not unwarranted, crosses the line that separates chronicling the life from prostrating oneself before the dead. (32 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018702-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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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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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