Filled with revealing information from the participants, intriguing tidbits, and show trivia, this compendium will have fans...
An oral history of the acclaimed HBO police drama.
After a five-year run, The Wire ended in 2008. Other than two Emmy nominations for writing, the show never garnered much critical acclaim. In this detailed history of the show, Bleacher Report contributor Abrams (Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution, 2016, etc.) writes that the series “is now celebrated as one of the greatest television shows ever made.” Producers, writers, directors, and actors speak for themselves via the many interviews the author conducted. Along the way, Abrams includes commentary and behind-the-scenes reflections. There never would have been a show if not for David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter whose two nonfiction books, Homicide (1991) and The Corner (1997), covered the topics that The Wire would explore. Simon had worked with network TV before, but he felt HBO would be the best place for his edgy tale about Baltimore police officers and drug dealers that would focus on a wiretapping sting operation. Chris Albrecht, the CEO of the network, agreed: “We were trying to distinguish ourselves from what else was on television.” Simon worked with co-creator Ed Burns to put together a mostly black, little-known ensemble of actors. The Wire’s story was complex and slow-burning; like reading a novel, it “allowed its audience space to interpret”—and pay attention. As Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) said in the first season, “all the pieces matter.” The creators drew on some of the best directors and writers, and Simon always gave detective novelist George Pelecanos “the penultimate episode of the season” in which “people got killed.” Richard Price “really dug the characters,” and novelist Dennis Lehane felt the show changed TV: it “pushed its borders a little further than where they’d previously been positioned.”
Filled with revealing information from the participants, intriguing tidbits, and show trivia, this compendium will have fans scurrying back to their DVD sets.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-49814-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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