A book-length Special Achievement Oscar acceptance speech.
Onetime special assistant to LBJ and head of the Motion Picture Association of America pens his memoirs, definitely rated G.
It should come as no surprise that when somebody like Valenti (Protect and Defend, 1992, etc.) finally gets around to writing the story of his life, he not only dishes no dirt, but eliminates every hint of grime. As he tells it in a narrative that hops willy-nilly through time, life is peachy, filled well-nigh to bursting with wonderful opportunities, lucky coincidences, helpful friends and memorable dinner parties. Things started out peachy growing up among Greek and Italian immigrants on an unpaved street in Houston and just kept getting better, almost without fail. Sure, serving as a B-25 pilot during WWII had its tough moments, but the GI Bill got him into Harvard Business School, which eventually helped him set up an ad agency back in Houston, so that worked out OK. It was a bummer for this well-connected Lone Star Democrat to have helped arrange JFK’s Texas visit in November 1963, but hours after the assassination he was on Air Force One as a special assistant to the new president, so there’s a silver lining there too. Valenti accords readers a fascinating and rightfully adoring glimpse of volcanic, passionate LBJ, but his time at the White House ended in 1966, when he was wooed by Hollywood to head up the MPAA. (He finally stepped down in 2004.) It would be nasty to conclude that Valenti comes off here as nothing more than a company man with a toothy Cheshire grin, but it’s hard to find anything much more positive to say about a memoir more intent on name-dropping and ticking off plaudits to buddies and bosses than in giving a reckoning of Valenti the man.
A book-length Special Achievement Oscar acceptance speech.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-34664-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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