by Mark Bailey ; illustrated by Edward Hemingway ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2014
If you have a hipster’s need to drink your way through film history in the footsteps of Bogey and Bacall or just want to hit...
A toper’s guide to booze and its discontents in the film mecca that is Los Angeles.
Sure, Bogart drank—and W.C. Fields and Jackie Gleason, by the gallon. But Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Veronica Lake? Yep, they swilled alcohol as if there were no tomorrow and no consequence—and, at times, as if there were no laws against it. Screenwriter Bailey and artist Hemingway (Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers, 2006) team up to profile some of Tinseltown’s most notorious drinkers (and a few secret tipplers as well), along with the watering holes they favored, from the Polo Lounge to Ciro’s and a few lesser-known saloons in less fashionable districts. They write in the same style that fuels such tell-alls as Hollywood Babylon and Mommy Dearest: Sure, Errol Flynn often played a scamp, but who knew that he was so downright awful in real life? Unfortunately, Bailey brings too little new information to the table, though when he does, it’s a revelation. The packaging, too, is pleasant enough, with its abundant sidebars, recipes—if you’re going to read the book, you might as well learn how to make simple syrup, as well—and caricatures. Bailey’s yarns, lasting about a beer apiece, are engaging enough as well and sometimes shocking to boot—it rattles our image of the man, for instance, to learn that sweet Stan Laurel, a constant drunk who put down “a ton of whiskey,” once threatened to bury his wife alive. Overall, the book is pleasantly enjoyable but dispensable.
If you have a hipster’s need to drink your way through film history in the footsteps of Bogey and Bacall or just want to hit all of LA’s historic hotspots or perhaps are just taking your liver out for a thorough road test under the swaying palms, then this is your vade mecum. Otherwise, stick to Kenneth Anger or maybe Barton Fink.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56512-593-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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by Mark Bailey ; Michael Oatman ; illustrated by Edward Hemingway
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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