Depp plays oddballs and once messed up a hotel room. We knew this going in, right?
Thimble-deep bio of misfit maestro Johnny Depp.
Intrepid celebrity biographer Goodall (Christian Slater, 2006) here updates his 2004 tome What’s Eating Johnny Depp?, re-titling his efforts The Secret World of Johnny Depp; most curious, considering the fact that this ungainly hodgepodge of previously published interviews, biographies and promotional materials contains nothing that could be construed as a “secret.” Goodall’s method is to assemble the most innocuous and inane existing material on a given Hollywood tyro (much of it obviously culled from that lowest form of journalism, the junket interview); quote liberally from other reviewers (Roger Ebert should receive royalties); breathlessly synopsize the plots of the relevant films in a style somewhere between that of an extended pull-quote and a book report by a bright seventh grader; and pad, pad, pad, discoursing pointlessly on such ephemerally related topics as the authenticity of Pirates of the Caribbean’s ships, or the travails of director Gillian Armstrong, who has never worked with this particular actor. There is no context or analysis provided for understanding Depp’s films or technique—Private Resort gets the same laborious plot rundown as Edward Scissorhands—but odd redundancies and gaffes abound (a favorite: Goodall refers to broadcaster Rush Limbaugh as “she”). These are at least mildly amusing and break the monotony of what feels like a surreally endless People magazine article. The book’s bloodlessness and superficiality become mesmerizing—when Goodall musters a subjective opinion about something, it is along the lines of deeming the nightmarishly gruesome A Nightmare on Elm Street “frequently unpleasant.” The author does get uncharacteristically heated up about critics; the reader will draw his or her own conclusions on this point. Goodall begins his story with the assertion that Depp is “finally achieving the kind of achievement that all Hollywood was applauding.”
Depp plays oddballs and once messed up a hotel room. We knew this going in, right?Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-85782-597-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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