Slips occasionally into hearsay and grievance but rivets readers with “a kind of fascinated horror.”
Through interviews with remnants of a long-gone Hollywood, a vivid sense of some of the great formative families emerges.
Readers of George Plimpton's Paris Review will be familiar with the interview structure of this compelling, occasionally gossipy, informative chronicle of the flamboyant personalities from a storybook Hollywood era and the great houses they inhabited in Beverly Hills and Malibu. Stein (Edie: An American Biography, 1982, etc.), formerly an editor at Paris Review and Grand Street, delves into the strange, incredible sagas of early Los Angeles oil baron Edward L. Doheny; Warner Bros. founder Jack Warner; schizophrenic teenager Jane Garland (and her coterie of male handlers); actress and wife of David Selznick, Jennifer Jones; and the author's father, Jules Stein, founder of Music Corporation of America—all of whom were more or less neighbors and party acquaintances in the area. The speakers, aside from their names, are not otherwise identified; readers have to scan the "biographical notes" in the back, a structure aiming no doubt to maintain a fluidity to the narrative. Indeed readable, this work, through its gradual fleshing-out of the biographical portraits, depicts these larger-than-life legends who were vulnerable to scandal and heartbreak. Doheny, one of the richest men in the country in the 1910s, endured the suicide of his first wife and the death of his son following the Teapot Dome trial of 1929. Warner, remembered by his son Jack Jr. early on as a lovable man before success corrupted him, did not live to see his grand house on Angelo Drive bought by David Geffen in 1990. Actress Jones became the ultimate Hollywood hostess while weathering tremendous emotional instability. Jules Stein, the son of Lithuanian immigrants in South Bend, Indiana, left his career as an ophthalmologist to start a band-booking business and created an entire empire.
Slips occasionally into hearsay and grievance but rivets readers with “a kind of fascinated horror.”Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9840-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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