Here, free-lance journalist Sander (The New York Times, Rolling Stone, etc.) takes one of the most haunting subjects of the video age—master TV-writer Rod Serling—and fumbles the chance for a major biography. Drawing on interviews with more than 200 from among Serling's friends, family members, and colleagues, Sander does a creditable job in capturing the sometimes maniacal, often thrilling nature of live TV in the new medium's Golden Age, and of Serling's indispensable contribution to it through the innovative teleplays Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight. Sanders also sketches the outlines of a fascinating, sometimes paradoxical hero: a WW II paratrooper who continually mined his memories of combat for his writing; a prolific author (200 known teleplays) who felt deeply insecure about his achievements; a man who was dominated by his wife and expressed his rebellion through affairs; a critic of advertisers' interfering with scripts who later embarrassed himself by pitching products like floor wax; and a Jew from Binghamton, New York, who converted to Unitarianism. Like his hero, radio-writer Norman Corwin, Serling became the creative, liberal conscience of his young medium. But the dozen years before Serling died of cancer in 1975 were blighted by alienation from ratings-obsessed network executives, inability to succeed at screenwriting, and craving for the celebrity he had achieved as host-creator of The Twilight Zone. All of this should make for a moving tragedy of an artist undone by circumstance and his own inner contradictions—but Sander's writing is often plodding, and he fails to summarize Serling's anguish or influence on authors in or out of TV with the force and depth of detail of Joel Engel's Rod Serling (1989). A misfire in its attempt to do justice to one of TV's cult heroes and giants. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93550-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
