A penetrating, incisive biography of the young but already legendary filmmaker. Perhaps nothing reveals the importance of Spielberg (Schindler's List, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc.) at this moment in film history more than that this is the second full- scale work on the artist in as many months (see John Baxter, p. 181). But there is no contest. McBride, the author of Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992), a landmark in film biography, leaves Baxter in the dust. McBride combines extensive research into Spielberg's life with lucid, well-considered analyses of his films, discovering in them a depth and originality that will surprise even Spielberg's greatest fans. McBride devotes nearly half the book to a consideration of Spielberg's childhood and his early evolution as an artist. He patiently debunks many of the myths generated by Spielberg himself and examines the ways in which his troubled early years manifest themselves in his work. For example, McBride demonstrates that the filmmaker's relationship with his eccentric mother and frequently absent father are reflected in even such apparently impersonal work as the Indiana Jones movies. Then McBride details the making of each of Spielberg's films and critiques them with vivid insight. His impassioned defense of such problematic works as The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun make the reader want to see them again. If, in the book's second half, the public persona dominates the private life, that's an accurate reflection of a man who increasingly seems to exist most fully and comfortably in his work. McBride leaves Spielberg as he, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg establish a new studio, DreamWorks. Film history at its best: rich in information, often dazzling in perception. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81167-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
