Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no,...
An often intense personal memoir recounts the dedicated stage actress’s journey to an Oscar, as well as memorable bumps in the road.
Dukakis got her statuette for Best Supporting Actress, after almost three decades onstage, for the film Moonstruck in 1988. Her disjointed narrative opens in that time of triumph, coincident with the unsuccessful presidential campaign of her cousin, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The author takes a beat or two to celebrate her Greek-American heritage and her immigrant family’s travails in overcoming humble beginnings and long odds in Lowell, Massachusetts. After acknowledging that there was already a large Greek community in place, for example, Dukakis recalls “Irish dominance” as the reason given and accepted for her father’s failure to pass the bar exam. The celebration turns dark as she delves relentlessly into an ethnic childhood with neurosis fertilized by her parents’ obsession with the potential for being “dishonored” by a daughter—based, Dukakis suggests, on an incident back in their home village that had fatal consequences. Terrified as a child by her mother’s constant threats of physical violence, she gradually apprehended the stress of accepting a traditional second-class woman’s role to preserve family unity. After recounting numerous personal shortfalls, false starts, unrequited love, descent into drugs, drink, and depression (including suicidal fumblings), Dukakis pronounces that “acting saved my life,” and readers who have hung in to this point should certainly be ready to believe her. Marriage to actor Louis Zorich, their joint passion for theater in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, then a 19-year association with the Whole Theater Group of Montclair, New Jersey, firmly fixed her dedication. The narrative takes a notable side trip into goddess-based eastern mysticism, resulting in an auditory epiphany: no hallucination, claims she.
Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no, Moonstruck star Cher never comes up).Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018821-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
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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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