Autobiography of the actor, his first book (published in Britain as Travelling Player). Though ever striving for variety in his roles, York is best known in the States as a leading man and, as is Cabaret, as the passive support for other characters. In England, he has played Romeo, Hamlet, and Cyrano, and since then has made his belated but well-received Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams's two-character play Out Cry. Born in 1942 in the village of Fulmer, he was the son of a serving RAF officer, and later businessman, whose wife was six years older. He showed an early gift for acting, which was fed by the Oxford University Dramatic Society and developed professionally in the Dundee Repertory, then seen to flower modestly in Olivier's National Theatre. York made an early transition to film, first appearing in Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew, Harold Pinter- Joseph Losey's Accident, a 13-part BBC-TV version of The Forsyte Saga, and again with Zeffirelli in his gloriously mounted Romeo and Juliet as fiery young Tybalt. York married young, to Pat McCallum, an American photographer, honeymooned in India while serving in his first Merchant-Ivory production. After George Cukor's failure Justine, in which he played Durrell's narrator Darley, his film career crested in Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which was followed by spirited work in Richard Lester's Musketeer films and Marty Feldman's The Last Remake of Beau Geste. But what can be said of such duds as the musical remake of Lost Horizon? Perhaps York's most recent success was with Michael Gambon in the BBC-TV version of Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, with its Pinter script. York writes at leisurely length (like Cottrell on Olivier), is always affable, warm-spirited, evenhanded, seldom memorable, and never brilliant.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-68940-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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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