Staying married and eliciting laughter: both are more of a challenge than the title might suggest. But if this requires more...
More than a biography, this is an account of the whole gamut of emotions and experiences that populate and define a life.
Readers better not expect a laugh fest starring the high-decibel, orange-haired father of George Costanza on Seinfeld. Stiller did play that role, years after the fade-out of the comedy act called Stiller and Meara, which brought fame to him and his wife Anne. But this book is not about the Seinfeld escapade. Likewise, anyone wanting to read about the dad of busy young actor Ben Stiller will find only a sentence or two about Ben's childhood and career. For the most part, Stiller's memoir inhabits another era entirely, where the author's idols were people like Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante, and where trips to vaudeville shows with his father gave him his love of theater. We cover a lot of territory: the immigrant experience of Stiller's mother and grandparents, life in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side during the first half of the 20th century, the Depression, growing up in a dysfunctional family (before that term was invented), and army life for an eager teenage recruit toward the end of WWII. We are also introduced to a more innocent time in show business, when the guy sweeping outside the theater could be the producer, and when you might get a part if you promised to also paint scenery. There's a lot of name-dropping here, but a little past the halfway mark, Stiller seems to settle down to a less anecdotal, more sincere presentation. In that final third of the book, Stiller describes his return to serious acting and strives to understand his marriage. In both areas, he struggles to find the real emotions he fears he has buried too deep.
Staying married and eliciting laughter: both are more of a challenge than the title might suggest. But if this requires more attention from the reader than expected, it also yields a more satisfying read.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86903-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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
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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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