A light entertainment.
The personal shutterbug for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton shares his behind-the-scenes impression of an age of glamour long gone.
As Bozzacchi (Elizabeth Taylor: The Queen and I, 2002) acknowledges, decades after the photos on which he built his reputation, “even if I got elected President of the United States, I’d still be remembered as the man who was once Elizabeth Taylor’s personal photographer.” He gives his readers what he knows they want: lot of photos of the star he knew as “Baby Boobs,” numerous anecdotes of the tempestuous couple (the author tried in vain to keep pace with Burton’s drinking), and some hit-and-run impressions of others who came into his orbit, often because he was in the famous couple’s orbit. Bozzacchi shot an official portrait of Princess Grace Kelly and her royal family as well as plenty of photos of her more casually posed (and shared here), largely because she had been so impressed with the way in which he captured the many dimensions of Elizabeth Taylor (who wrote the foreword to this book shortly before her death) and humanized her in the process. The author writes of the difficulties of shooting Picasso, of Al Pacino’s shyness, of his encounters with everyone from Rock Hudson to John Wayne to Elvis Presley to Raquel Welch (who may well have had a fling with Burton, though at least one of them was too drunk to remember). He insists that the famous cover of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road was his idea and that the band then took it to another photographer and that he recognized the potential in Rocky when it was still a screenplay. He also addresses the end of an era, as glossy magazines that prized beauty gave way to a thirst for scandal and photos that captured celebrities at less than their best.
A light entertainment.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8131-6874-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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