A loving case study, meticulously researched, best on the early years before the accolades began to accumulate.
Clinical psychologist and former comedian Stephenson balances wifely affection with professional analysis in her biography of Billy Connolly, who survived abandonment as well as physical and sexual abuse to become a noted musician, comedian, and actor.
The narrative alternates between the couple’s current life in Los Angeles and Billy’s early years in Glasgow, where he was born in 1942 as his father was about to leave for the battlefields of Burma. The Connollys were Catholics who had left Ireland to make a better life in Scotland, but they still could only afford a squalid tenement apartment with two rooms and a communal washroom. When Billy was three and older sister Florence not yet five, their mother walked out, leaving the kids alone in a cold apartment without food. His father’s two unmarried sisters eventually took them in, but one of the aunts regularly beat and belittled Billy. Things only got worse when his father came back from the war and began sexually abusing the boy. School was no better; teachers were free with physical punishment and verbal abuse. In his teens, Billy began playing the banjo and singing and eventually left his job as a welder at the Clyde shipyards. He overcame a horrendous childhood to become famous, first in Scotland as a musician and comic, then in London, and now in the US. As Stephenson notes, “Billy’s real story is an utterly triumphant one.” Known for his outrageous wit and costumes, he initially had difficulty coping with fame. His first marriage failed, he took drugs and drank heavily. Stephenson, who met him while she was acting on British TV, details all the low moments as well as the highs: his doctorate from Glasgow University in 2001, his acclaimed role in the movie Mrs. Brown, and his friendships with stars like Judi Dench, Michael Caine, and Dustin Hoffman.
A loving case study, meticulously researched, best on the early years before the accolades began to accumulate.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-308-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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