A worthwhile portrait by a capable biographer.
The story of how a troubled boy from Utah who rarely watched films became the director of Being There and Harold and Maude, challenging Hollywood with his progressive attitude.
FilmInFocus editor Dawson chronicles each of Ashby’s films from its conception to premiere in dense detail, enriched by hundreds of reported conversations and recollections. The author pays special attention to Ashby’s formative years as an editor, during which he was mentored by director Norman Jewison through many films before eventually being handed the reins. According to countless testimonies from his peers, friends and actors, Ashby was brilliant, witty and entertaining. His reputation and appearance as a drug-addled hippie belied his obsessive work ethic and commitment to professionalism on set. Much of the delight in reading this story comes from the irony surrounding certain films and personal choices. Before it became a cult classic, Harold and Maude was a flop with the critics. Though he climbed purposefully to prominence as a filmmaker, Ashby dove headlong into new love affairs without circumspection; he married within weeks and divorced almost as quickly. Dawson posits that the death of Ashby’s father—which Hal, alone among his family, considered a suicide—was the shadow the filmmaker could never escape and the source of chronic unrest in his personal life. The author withholds this kind of analysis for most of the narrative, but he offers it occasionally as a justification for Ashby’s eruptions and abandonments. Dawson glides through Ashby’s wrecked personal relationships, wisely choosing to dwell instead on the work of a man whose career consumed his life.
A worthwhile portrait by a capable biographer.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8131-2538-1
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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