Yet another biography of perhaps the most iconic of film actresses—this one an awkward accumulation of largely irrelevant detail that leaves Garbo a cipher. Garbo scholars must contend not only with the basic problem of their subject's nearly lifelong public silence, but also with her apparent refusal, even among friends, to talk about her career, her love life, or much of anything else. Most information about her tends to come from the conjectures of acquaintances whose accounts—especially those of her putative lovers Mercedes de Acosta and Cecil Beaton—are notoriously untrustworthy. Biographer Swenson (Barbra: The Second Decade, not reviewed) presents a rewarding view of Garbo's early European film career, including the blustery shenanigans of her Svengali, the director Mauritz Stiller, and the negotiations that led to her signing with MGM. But Swenson's exhaustiveness is often maddeningly pointless. For instance, she devotes a page to a variety of contradictory explanations for an episode of illness; for one diagnosis, pernicious anemia, she offers a detailed medical explanation, then adds a footnote to say that Garbo probably didn't have pernicious anemia at all, leaving us still ignorant as to what ailed her. Swenson goes into commendable depth about Garbo's affair with costar John Gilbert; about later affairs, though, with both men and women, there is so little reliable information that Swenson's disorganized efforts to discuss them seem futile. While she presents the impressions of many of Garbo's friends in Sweden and America, neither the fondest recollections nor the most sympathetic biographer can counter a lot of evidence that Garbo was a childish, intellectually feeble bore whose personality apparently encompassed little beyond wary passivity and spoiled petulance. So it's not entirely Swenson's fault that she fails to find any understandable motivation behind Garbo's half-hearted attempts to return to films after her 1941 swan song, Two- Faced Woman, and the empty globe-trotting decades that followed. Well-intentioned, but regrettably garbled. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80725-4
Page Count: 617
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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