Surely the breeziest account yet of the Blacklist.
Slapdash memoir from a once-blacklisted actor.
Knox is a method actor, but the detail, insight, and introspection that define that school of acting hardly characterize his autobiography. Knox was born on Coney Island in 1922, the illegitimate child of Russian Jews. He behaved, he says, like “a little shit,” the first of many crude terms he scatters throughout. Home life in the Depression may have influenced Knox to become an actor, but he doesn’t speculate on his motivation, as method actors often do. Instead, he says he chose his career “out of the blue,” an observation to make Lee Strasberg bang his head against the fourth wall. In short order, Knox appears on the New York stage, then in Hollywood films as a Warner Bros. contract player. His pace now revved up to the speed of a whizbang, B-level gangster film, Knox recalls making I Walk Alone, Knock on Any Door, and White Heat in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Knox’s tales of lotus land and his style go beyond the stale: “Legend has it,” Knox writes, that—gasp!—Lana Turner was discovered at the counter of Schwab’s Drugstore. Knox works with left-wing writers Marc Blitzstein and Bertolt Brecht and—zip!—the actor is blacklisted. No matter. Whoosh! Knox flies to Europe, where, over four decades, he works in films, playing supporting roles and dubbing or coaching actors who don’t speak English. Pleasures on La Dolce Vita are often carnal, he recalls, observing delicately, that “Sooner rather than later, costars fuck,” and that “In the normal course of pursuing pussy, Roman men are relentless.” Tales about work with Anna Magnani, Eli Wallach, and Orson Welles are more engaging and tasteful.
Surely the breeziest account yet of the Blacklist.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-575-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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