by Milo Speriglio & Adela Gregory ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1993
Criminologist Speriglio's third book on the Marilyn Monroe question (Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-up, 1982; The Marilyn Conspiracy, 1986—neither reviewed), rounding up what's new since 1986. Speriglio makes the hardest case yet that Marilyn was the victim of foul play carried out by a Mafia hit team from Chicago, masterminded by mobster Sam Giancana at the behest of Joseph Kennedy, Sr., and JFK but unbeknownst to Bobby Kennedy. If you find it hard to believe that a President and his father could be behind the murder of a film star, Speriglio presents the means and motive to make your disbelief waver strongly. But first he offers a dull biography with barely a new word anywhere, aside from an interview with the actress's close friend and makeup artist Whitey Snyder, who was her first cosmetician at Fox and did the grisly, postautopsy face-and-wig prep for her funeral. The bio—apparently by coauthor Gregory—also is deaf, dumb, and blind about Laurence Olivier, indicating that he was a humorless bumbler of no comedic talent when he directed Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl—in which, arguably, she gives her best performance outside of Bus Stop. Moreover, the bio calls Olivier's supporting cast of accomplished British stage players ``insecure'' and ``easily threatened'' by Marilyn's proven comedic talents. The book comes into bloom only with the alleged murder and cover-up. The two hit men are said here to have chloroformed the actress and then, with a bulb syringe, squirted a chloral hydrate/Nembutal solution into her bowel are named—and their subsequent history is followed closely: One discussed the hit with his lover, Eugenia Pappas, who, upset by the knowledge, was soon shot through the chest and dumped into the Chicago River. Pappas's brother came forward in 1986 to reveal what his sister had told him about her ``killer fiancÇ''- -leading to this book. Brainless bio followed by riveting murder investigation. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen) (Film rights sold to Adona Productions)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-125-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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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