Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and...
Novelist/memoirist Johnson (Perfect Together, 1991, etc.) revisits Century City, Culver City, and New York City in the days when bicoastal travel meant riding The Chief or The Twentieth Century and the movies starred quick-witted women and well-groomed men speaking clever dialogue.
A lot of that dialogue was scripted by Nunnally Johnson, a dominant Hollywood writer/producer as well as the author’s father. So what would it be like, you ask, coming of age in Hollywood’s Golden Age? In glorious black and white, Johnson recalls little Shirley Temple and Roddy McDowell, the pools, the croquet games, the gossip of The Business in the summers with Pop. Winters in New York with Mom involved the Gorgon School with Tony Perkins, Old Golds, cocktail shakers, Peck & Peck, and “coming out”—in a more innocent time when that had nothing to do with your sexual orientation and everything to do with debutante balls. East or West, once the war was over, Johnson endured teenage parties and the rigors of dating. She sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and flew home into Idlewild. Johnson’s flashback includes friends like frosty Gregory, anorexic Julie, and Don Sweetheart (yes, that’s his real name). The cast includes Betty and Bogey, Smith classmate Sylvia Plath, and colorful stepparents. Her memory piece’s best-drawn portraits are Hollywood Pop, he of three wives and four children, and New York Mom. It’s all terribly dramatic, but why not? Nunnally advised his daughter to think of herself “not as Schrafft’s but as ‘21’,”and so she does. She trots out the grand old motifs of teenage angst, money, and sex—the latter problem temporarily solved when she finally does it. The book ends with Nora’s marriage and the prospect of settlement in an Aramco post in the Arabian desert. It seems more installments are due.
Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and good company on the red-eye or the beach.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3447-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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