A touching, textured, and compellingly written slice of the iconic actress’s life.
Marilyn Monroe’s whirlwind engagement with New York City receives a fitting reflection.
Using a wealth of interviews, key documents, and ongoing correspondence, Winder’s (Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, 2013) illuminating chronicle of Monroe’s relocation to Manhattan centers on the actress in 1953 as she became increasingly restless and eager to abandon her “lonely life” in Hollywood, always powered by “cliques, connections, and friends of friends.” In an effort to regain control over her career and allow disputed contract terms with Fox to simmer, Monroe secretly relocated and, together with photographer Milton Greene, formed a production company on the East Coast and began taking method acting classes in Manhattan with Lee Strasberg. She spent much of her New York time cultivating Marilyn Monroe Productions, fraternizing with the likes of Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, and Arthur Miller, and revitalizing her public image. However, as Winder notes, for Greene, keeping track of her became an immeasurably daunting task. Personally and professionally blossoming with the blockbuster success of The Seven Year Itch (1955), Monroe focused on making her company profitable, but insecurity became her biggest nemesis after returning to foster her career with Fox in Los Angeles, a city where she was “a milkmaid among Malibu tans.” With a storybook cadence and impressive description, Winder writes of this time in Monroe’s erratic life as an empowering, fulfilling episode, an opportunity to spread her creative wings amid a caged life fraught with the kind of grueling career pressures and studio demands that necessitated medicating herself to relieve chronic insomnia. Asks the author, “who was this warm-blooded space creature who lugged around dictionaries, spoke like a drugged-up puppy, and looked like a French pastry?” Winder doesn’t pretend to unravel the many mysteries of Monroe, but she respectfully and quite thoughtfully salutes her East Coast tenure as she reveled for an instant in the sparkling possibilities of life in the Big Apple.
A touching, textured, and compellingly written slice of the iconic actress’s life.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06496-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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