Thoughtful and entertaining, an engaging example of determination both on screen and in real life.
A memoir from a physically disabled actor who navigated the rough-and-tumble world of showbiz.
You may not recognize his name, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen Mahon in a TV show or movie. Since the 1970s, this veteran character actor has appeared in numerous works—usually portraying a police officer or military man—such as The Exorcist, The Rockford Files, The X-Files, L.A. Confidential and Armageddon. But for Mahon, the path to Hollywood wasn’t easy; as detailed in his memoir, he spent most of his life facing personal and professional obstacles. In 1950, at the age of 12, Mahon contracted polio, which caused him to lose the use of his left arm; his descriptions of the illness put into perspective just how devastating the disease was at the time. While polio may have dashed his athletic ambitions—he refers to himself as a “gimp,” a rather sardonic term for a physically disabled person—Mahon found his calling in acting: “The fact was acting, although scary sometimes, made me feel a great deal more alive.” Yet he also admits that the decision to become an actor with a physical disability was “harebrained,” and while in search of his big break, he took on various jobs such as being a caseworker for the New York City Welfare Department, taxi driver and busboy. In auditions, sometimes his bum arm would cost him a part, though other times it didn’t matter. “I remember at one audition a tactless female producer in a loud voice announced: ‘He can’t even use his arm!’ ” The ongoing thread through this book is that, despite his physical disability and some professional setbacks, Mahon never gave up: “I didn’t want to be an actor. I had to be one.” Along the way, Mahon offers anecdotes about some of his acting roles; his friendship with Jason Miller, best known as Father Karras in The Exorcist and the playwright of the Pulitzer Prize–winning work That Championship Season; and his encounters with fellow actors such as Al Pacino, Warren Beatty, James Garner and James Coburn. Perhaps because Mahon isn’t a recognizable famous star and he didn’t live a tremendously glamorous lifestyle, the book’s tone is quite unassuming and modest compared with other gossip-laden celebrity tell-alls. Managing a dash of humor, he’s frank about some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of the profession—whether it’s dealing with a particular actor or director or working on projects that never got off the ground. Mahon’s straightforward, honest perspective about his craft could benefit aspiring actors who take heed of his wisdom and experience.
Thoughtful and entertaining, an engaging example of determination both on screen and in real life.Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495942495
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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