A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.
Collection of provocative profiles from Vanity Fair, showing those who’ve lived on Mars for the past ten years the power celebrities wield in America.
A sex scandal destroyed movie comic Fatty Arbuckle’s career in the 1920s; today it would make him bigger than ever. That’s essentially the conclusion Orth draws in her portraits of Madonna, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and others. The public’s appetite for celebrity news may go further back in time than the author acknowledges, but there’s no arguing with her statement that cable TV’s 24/7 reporting has turned the public into celebrity news bulimics. Just about anyone, Orth writes, can feed the media and become famous, whether or not they’re talented (to wit: Madonna). And someone famous can get away with just about anything (to wit: Woody Allen taking nude pictures of the adopted daughter he would eventually marry, or Michael Jackson dangling a baby from a hotel window). Orth also describes how Andrew Cunanan became the darkest of American celebrities when he shot and killed Gianni Versace and then himself. She builds a disturbing case for the influence of celebrity millions in political arenas as she reports on Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon of billionaire Marc Rich. Of course, Orth herself writes for a celebrity-driven publication, and these pieces will be read (with some guilt perhaps) by readers eager to scarf up crumbs about Liz and Liza. The author’s use of quotes from unnamed sources and her subjects’ former employees is journalistically questionable, but her details hit their marks, as in the profiles of deposed Maggie Thatcher and retired ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Dame Margot makes Orth nostalgic for the days when the famous were also talented.
A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.Pub Date: May 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7545-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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