Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday....
A dismal glimpse of a legendary comedienne’s reclusive retirement, told in a series of engaging anecdotes by a fawning confidant.
Tannen, who befriended Lucille Ball during her final ten years (1979–89), focuses on her professional decline and her marriage to “second rate comic” Gary Morton. An I Love Lucy fanatic since childhood who was four decades younger than the star, Tannen claims to be Gary’s sister’s husband’s cousin––“a third cousin twice removed or something like that.” Despite this distant relation, he became Ball’s close friend and a credible spokesperson, winning the approval of her daughter, Lucie Arnaz. At her best, Ball made Tannen laugh, especially when she failed to recognize Katharine Hepburn on the phone and made “one of those contorted gestures with her mouth the way Lucy Ricardo would do when she was caught doing something naughty.” But Ball’s best rarely appears. She merely tolerated visits from her children and obsessed over her ex-husband, Desi Arnaz. By 1986, her “all too familiar trademark and gestures seemed tired and her legendary comic timing just wasn’t there” when she starred in her last sitcom, Life with Lucy, a humiliating flop. An outmoded has-been unable to get work, Ball dreaded showing her aging face in public and struggled to maintain her identity during her forced retirement. Divulging both Ball’s clinical depression and her lust for pranks, Tannen reveals the similarities and discords between the real woman and her merry on-stage persona. Refraining from scandal, but not from name-dropping and melodrama, the author spices up Ball’s humdrum retirement-hours of playing backgammon and watching Wheel of Fortune, with cameos from Shirley MacLaine and Liza Minnelli.
Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday. Those more intent on family drama and dirt on Desi should check out the more sensational accounts of Kathleen Bradley and Tom Gilbert.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28753-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
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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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