by Jon Krampner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1997
A long-neglected pioneer of live TV drama is appropriately praised but not brought to life in this biography by a contributing editor to Emmy magazine. Krampner ably interweaves the stories of Coe's rise in television and the growth of live TV drama in the 1940s and '50s, demonstrating Coe's crucial role in the flowering of that form. It needed both Coe's eye for acting talent (bringing young Grace Kelly and James Dean to TV) and his ability to attract and edit fine writers to produce enduring dramas like The Trip to Bountiful, The Days of Wine and Roses, and Marty, and the understated comedy Mr. Peepers. With the demise of live TV, Coe turned to producing Broadway successes like A Thousand Clowns. But after withdrawing from one of these (Fiddler on the Roof) he began to decline. Some successes, more failures, and serious drinking followed, until his death in 1979. All of Coe's artistic accomplishments serve his contention that ``there's nothing duller than rich people!,'' which became the driving force behind his trademark kitchen-sink dramas. Keys to his inner life are more elusive, however, despite accounts of his failed marriages and his father's early death. Some of the author's conclusions are also unconvincing. Though Coe lacks the cachet of other early TV luminaries, it is untrue that ``today, Fred Coe is forgotten.'' He lives on in the works of those he nurtured—Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Delbert Mann, and others- -and in TV's continued ability to succeed in the domestic drama. Coe's life may be sad, but it is not—as Krampner labels it— tragic, at least not as presented here. Similarly, comparisons to underappreciated filmmaker D.W. Griffith, which Krampner makes throughout the book, do not fully ring true. As the only sustained resource on Coe, this book is useful to media scholars, but as dramatic reading, it wants the poetic humanity of Coe's works. (20 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8135-2359-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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