Life of legendary Jean Harlow, rescued from an abyss of scandal by journalist Golden. (One hundred illustrations, including exclusive family candids, not seen here.) Golden's is a well-researched, straightforwardly written bio with some but not too much background filler about MGM and the Thirties and with no urge to be memorably stylish or sumptuously lighted by MGM—though the publisher will undoubtedly make a gorgeous art deco production out of this smartly priced book. Born Harlean Carpenter in 1911, Harlow died at 26 of irreversible kidney failure brought on by an infection—from that early death her later biographer Irving Shulman fashioned the sleaze-riot Harlow: An Intimate Biography that has hidden the real Harlow for the past quarter century. From Kansas City, Missouri, Jean married a wealthy orphan at 16, divorced him at 20, by which time she'd already gotten parts as a film extra, then been taken on by Howard Hughes for some breast-peepery in Hell's Angels and kept out on loan until MGM bought her from Hughes. At MGM, she struck gold as a platinum vamp, a limitation she overcame as a comedienne in the fast-talking satire Bombshell. Her second marriage to top MGM producer Paul Bern ended with Bern's suicide; her third to MGM cameraman Hal Rosson ended in disaffection. She was engaged to William Powell, 18 years her senior (all her men were father figures) when she died. Along the way, she and Gable had become the first great team of the talkies. Saratoga, their last picture together, was completed by a double. Going by her friends' comments, Harlow was a joyful, warmhearted, generous woman, perhaps slightly undersexed, who smoked but never drank or drugged, was not foulmouthd, and clearly was a gifted comedienne. A compelling story—but add in the production values on this book.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1991
ISBN: 1-55859-214-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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