Following in the monosyllabic wake of Katharine Hepburn's Me comes Bacall's Now: essays on love, work, children, and friendship. They're a bit makeshift but very human and, finally, offer a likable portrait of an interesting, complex survivor. For those who haven't heard from Bacall since her 1979 autobiography By Myself, she's a bit lonely. She's married off her children, and they all have a pretty good relationship, even though everyone has had ups and downs. She's trying to sell her house in Amagansett, N.Y., because she's not there enough, what with trips to London and Paris. She's ``traveling solo'': no men on the horizon, though at this point she feels she could align herself with Mr. Right. But is he ever hard to find! If the truth be told, there's never been anyone to match Bogie (and this, Bacall says, is the right spelling). In fact, these days she's practically channeling him (``the core of Bogie resides in me''). It's hard to get work even for a legend, and work is what has always defined her. So she's feeling a little tender and wondering what the future holds in store and after all, no one said life was easy. She emerges, even with a mantel full of little Henry Moores and memories of an amazing list of friends (Lenny Bernstein, Spence Tracy, Larry and Vivien, etc.), like an American woman approaching 70. She's a classy Jewish mother who tries to remain nonjudgmental as her only daughter, Leslie, is married by a Tibetan priest. And Bogie's baby is a grandma (she doesn't babysit). In describing how she took Leslie to the L.A. house on Mapleton Drive that she shared with Bogart and their two young children, she tries hard to show us that they were not just celluloid myths—they were real. Bacall's reminiscences of famous people are a little too dutiful. (Where is her famous sense of humor?) But her documentation of getting older, like Hepburn's, is real and recognizable to the aging rest of us. (40 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 200,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-57412-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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