Sheer heaven for movie buffs.
Superb bio of the high living, larger-than-life film producer, spellbindingly detailed by Harper’s Bazaar European editor Fraser-Cavassoni.
The author, who in 1982 worked as an assistant on Sam Spiegel’s production of Betrayal (written by her stepfather, Harold Pinter), was so intrigued by his flamboyant personality and reticence about his past that she made it her business to track down his origins. Born in western Galicia (now southeastern Poland) in 1901, Spiegel preferred to gloss over his humble Jewish roots; when asked his birthplace, he’d usually name Vienna. (In fact, he had attended the University of Vienna.) He emigrated to Palestine, married, and seven years later abandoned wife and daughter to sail for San Francisco. He returned to Berlin and Vienna to cut his producing teeth on several films and in 1939 came back to the US, hitting his stride a few years later as producer of Tales of Manhattan in 1942 and Orson Welles’s The Stranger in 1946. At one point, Spiegel had so many creditors that he changed his name to S.P. Eagle. Still, though, often penniless, he gave fantastic parties—his New Year’s Eve bashes were legendary—attended by all the big stars and directors. He produced many of the classic films of the 1950s and ’60s: The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, etc. He also infuriated three wives with his penchant for young girls, top fashion models, young actresses, and high-class prostitutes; he was known to interrupt business meetings to arrange his sex life. Meanwhile, his relentless methods and empty promises as a producer prompted Hollywood to invent the words “Spiegelese” and “to Spiegel.” A sublime cast of characters—John Huston, David Lean, Marlon Brando, Peter O’Toole, Faye Dunaway, Bogey and Bacall, Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan—adds to the fun. It even seems right that Spiegel died on New Year’s Eve in 1985.
Sheer heaven for movie buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-83619-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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