All-out victory for fans, though even pop-culture newbs will enjoy the ride.
This superpowered collection of more than 40 original, in-depth interviews explores the role of superheroes in pop culture—as told by the actors who played them.
In his impressive debut, Edlitz interviews actors who have played parts in shaping modern America’s quintessential mythology: the superhero universe. He delves into everything from the Adventures of Superman and Batman TV series of the 1950s and 1960s to the blockbuster movies of today. But this isn’t limited to heroes: interview subjects include noteworthy villains (such as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki), sidekicks (Jack Larson’s Jimmy Olsen), nonsuperheroes (Leonard Nimoy’s Spock), and writers and directors, including comic-book legend Stan Lee and Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man. He also interviews actors who appeared in less successful films, such as a never-released version of The Fantastic Four. Edlitz is clearly a superfan of superhero comics and films, and his lengthy introductions to each interview are packed with enough background info and trivia to please even hard-core fans. Interviews focus on how actors embodied these larger-than-life superheroes—the iconic costumes helped, as did the all-important secret identities—to become, in many cases, permanently identified with the roles. Lou Ferrigno, aka the Incredible Hulk, says, “I was that character all my life,” an idea echoed throughout the book. Edlitz’s insightful questions also explore weightier topics such as religion, mythology, race, and the nature of heroism, and in a battle against repetition, he often tailors questions to his subject. For instance, when talking with superheroines—such as Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) and Supergirl (Helen Slater)—he touches on issues of female role models and sexualized costumes. Edlitz frequently injects humor into his interviews, livening them up and always ending the conversation with a classic question: who’d win in a fight? “Your Batman or George Clooney’s?” he asks Adam West. “I think it depends on the circumstances,” West says. “It probably depends on the kind of battle. If it were to be a battle of charm, of course, Clooney would win.”
All-out victory for fans, though even pop-culture newbs will enjoy the ride.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1593937911
Page Count: 586
Publisher: BearManor Media
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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