MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)
Slipshod biographies of the men who roared at MGM.
Given that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was one of the most successful and influential film studios during Hollywood’s golden age, a take on its leading male stars is entirely in order. As actors, just how great were Tracy and Gable? What sort of masculinity emanated from two of the studio’s biggest stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly? Look for little insight here into those or other related topics. Wayne (The Golden Girls of MGM, 2003, etc.), who has penned nine other Hollywood bios, reveals her slant early on. Interviewing the famous, she writes in her preface, is “a waste of time.” The “unknown starlets” bent on revenge are much more reliable, while prostitutes who serviced the stars are even better sources, especially on their clients’ penis sizes. Thus, Wayne reveals that some stars (Frank Sinatra, for example) were bigger than others (Gable, alas). Overall, it seems, Wayne spends perhaps more time in her subjects’ bedrooms than she does on the sets of their pictures. She reports, for instance, that Spencer Tracy sometimes suffered impotence, Robert Taylor was rumored to be bisexual, and Van Johnson was presumed by some actors to be gay. As for the films these MGM Boys (as they were called) starred in, the author seldom has more than a word or a phrase for them: Sea of Grass, she writes, was “a miserable picture,” and so on. Tossing off more clichés than there are in a shelf of romance novels, and leaning heavily on previously published accounts, Wayne goes on to rehash the tired details of the men’s lives. Peter Lawford ran interference when John F. Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra was hopelessly besotted by Ava Gardner. Clark Gable broke into pictures by having sex with openly gay actor William Haines. Frankly, though, few will give a damn.
MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1475-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
