A frank celebrity memoir with good intentions but awkward execution.
Longtime character actor Pantoliano, known for memorable roles in films such as Risky Business, The Matrix, and Memento, and an Emmy Award–winning turn in The Sopranos, writes about his lifetime struggle with depression and substance abuse.
Known to friends and fans as “Joey Pants,” Pantoliano wrote about his upbringing in 1950s and ’60s-era Hoboken, N.J., in a previous memoir (Who’s Sorry Now: The True Story of a Stand-Up Guy, 2002). Here he focuses on his later life and career, which was profoundly affected by his undiagnosed depression, likely inherited from his psychologically abusive mother. Much of the memoir dwells on Pantoliano’s drunken escapades and fights through the years, his large sexual appetite and, later, addictions to Vicodin and Xanax. In one memorable passage, he gargles with water from a bar toilet after projectile vomiting—just one of several references to vomit and other bodily fluids. Pantoliano largely comes off as having been a selfish, undependable and unpleasantly needy person throughout much of his life, and it can make for rough reading. The book is also hobbled by odd, playlet-like fantasy sequences (including a conversation between Pantoliano and Sigmund Freud), celeb-bio clichés (“I had developed a habit...that when things were going good, I went out of my way to foul them up!”) and an unfortunate affection for exclamation points. On the plus side, Pantoliano is admirably open about his history of depression and his recent work to lessen the disease’s stigma and help others with similar conditions.
A frank celebrity memoir with good intentions but awkward execution.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60286-135-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
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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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