A gossipy yet earnest portrait of the once-popular British dramatist, unlikely to attract many American readers. Rattigan (191177) had his first West End success (French Without Tears) when he was only 25, and he would never quite shake his reputation as a smooth, shallow crowd-pleaser, even though London critics grudgingly admitted that The Browning Version (1948), The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954) were expert character studies that bleakly demonstrated the essential irrationality of love. (American critics were seldom even that welcoming, and few of his plays did well on Broadway.) At the height of his commercial success and artistic powers, in 1956, Rattigan was vilified—with only partial accuracy—as representative of a complacent, middle-class Britain that angry young men like John Osborne and Arnold Wesker were determined to destroy. He had a few more hits and a lucrative screenwriting career, but his self-confidence never recovered from the body blow dealt by the new theatre of the 1950s and its acolytes, most notably critic Kenneth Tynan. Wansell (Tycoon, 1987, etc.) had access to Rattigan's private papers and many of his friends; he has done a passable job of laying out the basic chronology, and his desire to do justice to a thoughtful, honest writer unjustly maligned as trivial strikes a chord. But his emphasis on the playwright's homosexuality seems excessive, an inadequate substitute for a three-dimensional presentation of Rattigan's personality, which remains shadowy. The heavy-handed insistence on a gay subtext in almost every Rattigan play is matched by Wansell's lugubrious and pedestrian explication of other themes, such as the playwright's fraught relationship with his parents. Not bad, but not good enough to gain renewed attention for a pleasing second-rank playwright. (8 pages illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16521-8
Page Count: 442
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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