Not just Langella’s “famous people I have known,” but a heartfelt love letter to the theater and to the days when stars were...
Stage and screen stalwart Langella recalls his encounters with celebrity, both in and out of the spotlight.
Early on in this engaging memoir, the author notes his difficulty in conveying the “glory” of a chapter’s subject, Noel Coward, to a contemporary audience, “as wit, intelligence, and style have lost ground to stupid, vulgar, and loud.” Curmudgeonly tone aside, Langella’s stories of 65 noteworthy people illustrate his point that the celebrities of today can’t hold a candle to the distant, mysterious, shining lights of yesteryear. The book is organized into a separate chapter for each “dropped name,” in chronological order of their death. Among those appearing, some in brief encounters, others in lifelong relationships, are many of film and theater’s greatest, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, to name just a few. Freed up, perhaps, to kiss and tell by the death of his subjects, Langella pulls no punches, expressing scorn for talent wasted (Richard Burton) and egotism misplaced (Anthony Quinn, Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg), and providing scandalous detail on many on-set or backstage dalliances. Some of the stories are humorous, others fascinating, and some—notably the section on Hayworth—heartbreaking. Though often relegated to a supporting role in these stories, Langella’s voice commands the reader’s attention. However, he does not ignore his own flaws, including moments when his arrogance let him down or his ignorance led to humiliation. Through it all, the author’s respect for the craft of acting and those who attempt to practice it at the highest level is evident, and his focus on the importance of real connection between not just actor and audience but between human beings, elevates the book above mere name-dropping.
Not just Langella’s “famous people I have known,” but a heartfelt love letter to the theater and to the days when stars were stars, not merely celebrities.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-209447-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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