Kelly's second book on the acclaimed director has the same patchwork quality as her Martin Scorsese: The First Decade (1980- -not reviewed). Billed as an ``oral history,'' it's really a compendium of quotations from Scorsese and his friends, family, and collaborators. Still, despite the limitations of the genre, Kelly manages to elicit some valuable production history and interpretive comments from her many interviewees, who range from Scorsese's ever- loquacious parents to the usually tight-lipped Robert De Niro, with whom Scorsese has created some of the greatest films of our time, from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver through Raging Bull and Goodfellas. Many of the actors who have worked with Scorsese celebrate here his remarkable directorial style, as do the technicians who marvel at his mastery of the form and his meticulous preparation. Others testify to his absolute devotion to the movies, a fervor matched by the religious intensity in many of his films. Kelly, who studied to become a nun, no doubt overworks the priestliness of Scorsese's vocation in her own prose interludes, much as she spends too much time detailing her personal encounters with the director. (Photos by her husband include two of her and Scorsese.) And the platitudes here by studio execs (Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner) are particularly worthless, as are the testimonial-dinner remarks that pass for forewords by Scorsese's director friends Steven Spielberg and Michael Powell. Vague references to personal problems in Scorsese's life remind us how little these interviews tell us about the man. That's exactly the sort of identity crisis this book suffers from—it aspires to critical seriousness but delivers mostly starlust.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-938410-79-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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