A third-rate biography of a second-rate talent. Even a fading camp icon like Midler deserves better than Mair's (Oprah Winfrey, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) breathless yet strangely feeble account. Despite its subtitle, this book, which has all the intimacy of a handshake, seems more of a testament to the NEXIS database than anything approaching original authorial research. Mair manages the remarkable feat of simultaneously telling us both more and less than we ever wanted to know as he traces Midler's rise from a lonely Jewish girl growing up in Hawaii to her mild accomplishments as chanteuse, actress, and occasional author. Every wonderful and fabulous and sensational twitch of an achievement by Midler is catalogued, with just a grudging iota of elbow room set aside for her less than wonderful, fabulous, and sensational moments. So she has a reputation for being incredibly difficult to work with? Tra-la-la. So she fired her entire musical troupe after a concert tour? Tiddley pom. Mair makes few attempts to understand Midler, to subject her and her talents to the kind of considered critical or psychological analysis usually found in biographies. In fact, Mair seems perfectly content to luxuriate in the reflected glow of his subject's general stupendousness. As he writes, ``We love her because she is us and we are her.'' Almost in spite of himself, Mair occasionally stumbles across something interesting. His brief analysis of the difficulties older actresses have finding roles (women over 40 get only 9 percent of all roles) borders on the trenchant. He also manages a reasonable understanding of Midler's resonant appeal to gay audiences. Not so much a tell-all biography as a fawning and amateurish show-and-tell. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55972-272-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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