by Michael Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1991
Well-done life of Rudolph Valentino's wife, a woman of boundless gifts, by art historian Morris (St. Mary's College). With a keenly written text and 150 duotones (not seen), and considering Natacha Rambova's background in Egyptology, ballet, and as an exotic costume and set designer (she designed Alla Nazimova's film of Salome, basing her costumes and sets on Aubrey Beardsley's original drawings for Oscar Wilde), Morris's biography bids fair to satisfy in all departments. Born Winifred Shaughnessy in Salt Lake City, Rambova signed up with the Theodore Kosloff Imperial Russian Ballet in Manhattan, was given her stage name by her lover Kosloff, who first seduced her at 17. When she confronted Kosloff with his infidelities, he bloodied her leg with birdshot. Rambova's mother's sister-in-law was sapphic Elsie de Wolfe, the world's first interior decorator, who took on Rambova's mother as her partner; both became millionaires, decorating homes for the rich and mighty. Rambova herself, who read only world mythology both as a child and an adult, inherited the de Wolfe/Shaughnessy artistic temperament, designed her own ballet costumes, became a costume designer for Cecil B. De Mille, later designed Rudolph Valentino's image, costumes, and sets, and then became a writer/director. Valentino had made only one film when she met him and began shaping his publicity. When his studio fought her efforts, Valentino signed a contract excluding her from work on his pictures. She fled and divorced him. Chasing her, Valentino came down with a necrotic hole in his stomach, died of longing in Manhattan, had a riotous funeral. Rambova went on to become a playwright, an actress, and a spiritualist, with her huge labors in Egyptology winning the admiration of Carl Jung. She died at 56, of scleroderma, a disease that dried up her inner organs. A questing, creative woman far ahead of her time—and truly exotic.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1991
ISBN: 1-55859-136-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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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