by Ernest Borgnine ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2008
Tepid and corny. Whatever happened to Fatso Judson?
Hollywood heavy is really a teddy bear—a very dull teddy bear.
Born in 1917, Borgnine reflects on his long life and career in this oddly toothless memoir. He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an introverted, lonely butcher in the 1955 film Marty, but Hollywood preferred him as sneering bully, and he was memorably imposing in such classics of macho cinema as From Here to Eternity, The Wild Bunch and The Dirty Dozen. How Borgnine felt about this typecasting remains a mystery, as he expresses wide-eyed gratitude for virtually every professional opportunity that came his way, repeatedly remarking on how lucky he was just to be in the business. Such modesty, though admirable, makes for dull reading. Largely forgotten movies like Hannie Caulder and Bunny O’Hare receive as much attention as the handful of classics Borgnine graced. The film fan eager for insights into the methods of Sam Peckinpah or Frank Sinatra will be frustrated, but those wondering if The Andy Griffith Show’s George “Goober” Lindsay was as friendly as he seemed on screen will be satisfied. (He was.) The much-married author is maddeningly circumspect when discussing his wives and marital difficulties. Of his short, surprising marriage to Broadway legend Ethel Merman, he divulges only that the relationship suffered when Merman became jealous of his greater fame. Borgnine is more forthcoming about his patriotism, expressing great admiration for John Wayne and Charlton Heston and, in a weirdly funny aside, defending the honor of cross-dressing FBI honcho J. Edgar Hoover. The pages fly by in a pleasant blur of “those were the days” homilies and aphoristic life lessons. He’s no prose stylist, but Borgnine’s enthusiasm for exclamation points is rather endearing—and they’re the appropriate punctuation for his relentlessly upbeat memoir.
Tepid and corny. Whatever happened to Fatso Judson?Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8065-2941-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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 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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