More fan fodder, enlivened by Billy’s witty observations.
Further incisive revelations distinguish actress-turned-psychologist Stephenson’s follow-up to her perceptive biography of husband Connolly (Billy, 2002), a noted Scottish comedian and actor.
Though this sequel loosely follows the year Billy turns 60, it’s as much about Stephenson herself. Each chapter begins with a recollection of his past—searching trashcans for sledding materials, sneaking his Protestant friends into a Catholic teenagers’ dance, becoming a paratrooper while on National Service—and then segues into his birthday year. The family alternates between Scotland and Los Angeles, with much traveling in between. Billy is on location in Canada and Somalia; Pamela takes their two teenaged daughters to India, where they visit the shelters established by the Connollys for streetwalkers’ children. Billy is ambivalent about his birthday, still subject to frequent nightmares in which he relives his troubled childhood: his mother left home, he was reared in a Glasgow slum by sadistic aunts, his father abused him. But Pamela continues her preparations for the August celebration, a weekend-long extravaganza at their estate in Scotland that includes the reenactment of a medieval battle, kilted pipe-bands, the honoring of the haggis, and a guest list studded with luminaries (Judi Dench, Bob Geldof), as well as Billy’s mates from his pre-fame days, when he worked as a welder. Billy survives, admitting that he normally doesn’t like birthday parties but absolutely loved his own. This naturally pleases Pamela, who is acutely aware of the demons in her man’s past, even though he stopped drinking and taking drugs in his 40s. She follows up the weekend blast with a (slightly) lower-key celebration on the actual day later in the year in Fiji, where she’s studying a group of transgendered Fijians. Evident throughout the witty text is her crucial role as a loving but concerned monitor of her husband’s life.
More fan fodder, enlivened by Billy’s witty observations.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7553-1284-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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