Savvy, though uneven, profile of America's oldest talent agency. William Morris began in 1898 as a vaudeville agent, but the German-Jewish immigrant was always receptive to new entertainment technologies that offered opportunities for his clients, whether in motion pictures or radio. Business writer Rose (West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, 1989, etc.) barely skims the years before Morris's death in 1932, and his coverage of the 1930s and early '40s is also sketchy; at times the author gets lost in show-biz anecdotes that have little to do with the William Morris Agency. The narrative kicks into gear with its smart assessment of the changes that swept the entertainment industry in the years following WW II, in particular the rise of television and breakup of the studio system, which left Hollywood vulnerable to the increasing demands of stars who could attract the audience. Led by Abe Lastfogel, the William Morris Agency consolidated its power and made its money by controlling the flow of talent, packaging groups of its clients to create the early television shows and making sure its movie actors were first in line for the juiciest roles. The company was known for its agents' low-key, businesslike demeanor and its family atmosphere; most employees joined straight out of school and stayed until they retired. Rose capably chronicles the stagnation that set in at WMA as financial types like Nat Lefkowitz gained power and the agency grew increasingly corporate, frustrating the people who actually dealt with talent and leading to the very public departures of six key employees in 1991. The book ends abruptly in that year, with no mention of developments since then and no assessment of the agency's prospects for the future. Almost always a lot of fun, although the lack of a coherent narrative thread means that the welter of names and anecdotes sometimes gets bewildering. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) ($40,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88730-749-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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