Dino light and lively; anyone seeking a probing look at the life of Dean Martin should look elsewhere—probably at Nick...
A biography of singer-actor Martin that has the pace, diffidence and depth of one of Martin’s T.V. variety shows.
In this relentlessly upbeat rehash of Martin’s life, Freedland breezes through familiar territory, and, while not shying away from negative terrain, seldom digs for answers or conclusions to questions surrounding Martin’s life and career. The famous Martin and Jerry Lewis partnership, for example, receives due attention as Freedland charts their rise and fall, presenting both sides of their eventual break-up. But were the “pardners” equally to blame for the breach? And what emotional bonds apparently held fast between them after they pursued separate careers? Likewise, tracing Martin’s major success as an actor and singer, Freedland hits all the marks, yet offers little insight. Did Martin work harder than his laid-back performance demeanor suggested? Was he a natural as an actor, or did he woodshed his parts behind the scenes, as the strength of some of his performances suggests? Freedland also offers a very detailed look at the workings of Martin’s greatest success, his TV variety show. The account certainly benefits histories of American television, but skirts key matters that define Martin’s winning image. What can be learned from his popularity? Why did audiences welcome Martin into their homes for 18 years? Was it because the fabulously wealthy charter member of the obnoxious Rat Pack really seemed like a happy neighbor ready to kick back, pour a drink and get high in the den? Perhaps readers who loved Dino will care less as they once more flip through his story.
Dino light and lively; anyone seeking a probing look at the life of Dean Martin should look elsewhere—probably at Nick Tosches’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992).Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-86105-882-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Robson Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
