Executed with the conviction and meticulousness of a Preminger production.
Richly embroidered biography of the legendary stage and film director with an incendiary temper and uneven legacy.
Preminger (1905–1983) could not have asked for a more assiduous or generous biographer than Hirsch (Film/Brooklyn College; Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, 2002, etc.), who has visited the archives, studied the films, interviewed the principals, walked the ground and read all relevant documents. The result will endure as the definitive life of one of film’s most intriguing and volcanic personalities. Born in Poland to a German-speaking Jewish family, Preminger spent his childhood in Austria, where he soon became obsessed with the theater. Gifted with an extraordinary memory, a ferocious work ethic and a vaulting ambition, the young man quickly established himself as an actor. When premature baldness ended his career as a leading man, he moved into character parts, often playing Nazis, then into the director’s chair. He arrived in New York in 1935 to direct a production on Broadway and by 1936 was making films for Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox. Later he became an independent producer and director. Hirsch devotes sufficient space to Preminger’s personal life, but his principal interest is in his subject’s evolution—and eventual disintegration—as a filmmaker. The author describes the mounting of each production, with wrenching accounts of Preminger’s fiery clashes with performers ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Paula Prentiss, Faye Dunaway and Dyan Cannon. He also unblinkingly records Preminger’s bullying of Tom Tryon and Jean Seberg, among others. But Hirsch credits the director for such fine films as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder and the underrated Advise & Consent. He praises Preminger, too, for dealing with difficult subjects and for breaking the blacklist by giving Dalton Trumbo, who refused to testify before the 1947 HUAC, a screen credit.
Executed with the conviction and meticulousness of a Preminger production.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41373-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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