A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.
A candid, corrective look at the Nation of Islam leader and renegade—and a deeply informed investigation of the evolution of his thinking on race and revolution.
For decades, distinguished scholar Marable (African-American Affairs/Columbia Univ.; Living Black History: How Re-Imagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future, 2006, etc.) studied the life and work of Malcolm X (1925–1965), and this meticulous sifting of the fact from the fiction expertly places him within the civil-rights movement of the time and as catalyst for the emerging Black Power struggle. The author looks beyond the myth that “Malcolmites” have woven around their leader and returns to original sources, such as NOI members and former members; Malcolm’s widow and their children; African and Islamist chiefs Malcolm met on his extensive travels abroad; civil-rights activists, who were wary of his views on racial separatism; and files by the FBI and New York Police Department, who may have been complicit in his assassination by NOI operatives on Feb. 21, 1965. First and foremost, Marable deconstructs Alex Haley’s masterly Autobiography of Malcolm X(1965), which he and Malcolm collaborated on for years before Malcolm’s death, but which exaggerates the exploits of Malcolm’s earlier manifestation as “Detroit Red,” probably in order to render more powerful the conversion to Islam of this hustler, pimp and thief incarcerated at the Norfolk Prison Colony. For years, Malcolm was NOI’s exalted evangelical front man and first minister, broadcasting the organization’s anti-white, anti-political doctrine before Malcolm’s recognition of the crucial work of the civil-rights activists and the need for global black political engagement prompted his break with the NOI to embrace what Marable terms Pan-Africanism. Moreover, Malcolm could not sanction Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital affairs and out-of-wedlock children, setting in motion a perilous countdown to NOI retribution. The Malcolm X revealed here was troublingly misogynist and occasionally precipitous in action and speech, but possessed a dauntless sincerity and intelligence that was only beginning to shape and clarify his message for humanity.
A bold, sure-footed, significant biography of enormous depth and feeling.Pub Date: April 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02220-5
Page Count: 594
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.
A quiet meditation on art and life.
Matar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and “gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.” His father’s presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which “stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval,” but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, “as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze.” Day or night, the “city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.” In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the “size of a tennis court” painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a “hymn to justice.” Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to “articulate a feeling of hope.” He also visited a vast cemetery, a “glimpse [of] death’s endless appetite.” Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio’s “curiously tragic” David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “epic altarpiece,” Maestà. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-12913-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
This lengthy biography of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy reveals lives as melodramatic and star-crossed as one of their movies—without the happy ending. Author Rich (president of one of four MacDonald/Eddy fan clubs still extant in the US) reveals more about the two lovers than even the most avid fan might want to know, including Nelson's descriptions of Jeanette's ``little nighties.'' The question it leaves unanswered is how the feisty soprano and the lusty baritone, certainly among Hollywood's most popular stars during the late 1930s and early '40s, managed to make such goulash of their love affair. Although both singers regularly denied it, according to Rich, they were attracted to each other from the moment they met. MacDonald was characterized as ``an ambitious career gal with a bad reputation'' and was rumored to be one of Louis B. Mayer's couch tomatoes. Mayer, in fact, frowned on the singers' relationship for professional as well as personal reasons, but cast them in Naughty Marietta, their first film together. It made the duet stars—and brought them to bed after nearly a year of stolen kisses. It wasn't romantic. In a jealous rage, Nelson raped Jeanette, according to Rich. But she forgave him, beginning a cycle of reconciliation and rejection that went on for 30 years, and included suicide attempts and miscarriages. In a rejection phase, MacDonald married actor Gene Raymond (who, she discovered, preferred men as sexual partners) while Eddy wed a possessive woman who refused divorce, in spite of his numerous infidelities (MacDonald was not the only liaison). A source for much of the material, including intimate details of the couples' private meetings, is Eddy's mother, Isabel, via her son's diaries and letters. A filmography is included. A bonanza for MacDonald/Eddy fans, a pan full of nuggets for aficionados of Hollywood and MGM, but an encyclopedic struggle for the less dedicated. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-407-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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