The life story of respected actor Eva Le Gallienne (18991991) and a case for her deep influence on the American theater. Robert A. Schanke beat Sheehy by four years with his Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne (not reviewed), but Sheehy (Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones, not reviewed) bests Schanke by size—her narrative is some 300 pages longer. But in this case, more is not necessarily better. Sheehy, unlike Schanke, enjoyed unlimited access to Le Gallienne's voluminous diaries and correspondence, and offers a sea of details (like the Christmas gifts she bought her friends in 1948) that will make her book valuable to Le Gallienne's fans and to theater students and scholars, but a long and tedious read to just about anyone else. Where Sheehy succeeds admirably (as did Schanke) is in presenting the now relatively forgotten Le Gallienne as one of the most important figures of the 20th-century American theater. Le Gallienne left Broadway at the height of her fame in 1926 to found the Civic Repertory Theatre, America's first nonprofit theater, and the embodiment of her ultimately failed dream to found a national company like those that flourish in Europe. Her lifelong advocacy of a noncommercial theater of quality, accessible to the masses, and her refusal to sacrifice her art for popular success, made her an enormously influential figure within the theater community. Le Gallienne was a woman of fascinating complexity: a great actor who went years without a starring role; a scholar whose translations made Ibsen's plays presentable to American audiences; a woman who drank too much and was often unfaithful to her lesbian lovers. She was, in fact, in many ways quite like her father, the alcoholic poet Richard Le Gallienne, who abandoned his family when Eva was a baby. Unfortunately, Sheehy's book tends to lose sight of a remarkable woman in a forest of details.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41117-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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