Though she was Eugene O'Neill's daughter, Charlie Chaplin's third wife (married at the age of 18), and the mother of actress Geraldine Chaplin, Oona O'Neill Chaplin (192591) did not lead the kind of life that merits a book-length recounting, especially one as lax and disorganized as this one by her former daughter-in-law. Novelist Patrice Chaplin (The Forgotten, 1984, etc.) makes grand claims for her subject's deep well-springs of talent: ``She was a hidden star,'' a ``queen of movieland's royal family.'' Again and again we are told how her charisma and vivacity and beauty were admired by all who met her. She may well have been ``a barefoot sprite, around whom happened marvellous, secret adventures as subtle as her perfume.'' But the truth is that apart from marrying well and having eight children, Oona didn't do very much. Nor is Chaplin is able to convincingly capture her subject's personality. Perhaps part of the problem is her status as Oona's ex-daughter-in- law, a strange twilight zone that provided enough closeness to moot a biographer's objectivity, yet too much distance for an intimate rapprochement. What we are left with is a series of recollected conversations and meetings, a few biographical details, and much too much about Patrice Chaplin. However, her understanding of the sadness of Oona's situation is keen—talent squandered, hopes hopelessly reposed in others, disappointments with her children. Oona seemingly lived so much through the lives of others that she never really had a life to call her own. Even her vices weren't her own—like both her parents, she found constant comfort in alcohol. Toward the end of her life, occasional tipsiness gave way to frequent and appalling scenes as she began to drink suicidally. Too few tidbits for Charlie Chaplin fans, and even the few Oonaphiles out there will be disappointed. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-86066-002-9
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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