The author of Five for Hollywood (1991) comes up with a galloping, hard-breathing bio of Beatty that recycles the gossip about his love life against the plots of his films. Parker here offers a wavering image that may well resemble Warren Beatty. Unlike close buddy Jack Nicholson (also the subject of a Parker bio), Beatty never sits for Rolling Stone profiles—and it wouldn't matter if he did, since all his interviews are masterpieces of smokespeak in which he absorbs questions like a black hole, taking in matter but giving off no light. His first major Hollywood romance, Joan Collins, however, has much to say, though largely through Parker's rehashes of her autobiography, Past Imperfect. A seeming interview with early Beatty lover Leslie Caron also sounds suspiciously literary: ``[Method acting] happened as with the Impressionists who all have a common denominator in their painting...This school of acting was first created by Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Arts Theatre''—and so on. Parker takes us through all the headline affairs: with Natalie Wood (separated from husband Robert Wagner), Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Michelle Phillips, Madonna, and Annette Bening, his wife and mother of his only child. Though Beatty's performances were always interesting and based in a discriminating choice of roles, he had to overcome a longstanding pretty-boy image to win critical favor by starring in and directing and/or producing Bonnie and Clyde (which rose above a bad press to become a smash hit), Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds—for which he won a directing Oscar—Dick Tracy, and Bugsy, among others. No sensational revelations here: just the glitz behind the tinsel.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0072-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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