A solid if sometimes digressive portrait of a stoic, hardworking player, never really influential but certainly memorable.
In which living as Obi-Wan Kenobi proves to be the best revenge.
Born in 1914, Alec Guinness, writes novelist-historian Read (Alice in Exile, 2002, etc.), was a bastard—in that old-fashioned, literal sense, that is. “My mother was a whore,” Guinness plainly told his friend John le Carré, a bit peeved at the matter. Illegitimate birth was common in those days, of course, but bound to mark a person for life in class- and status-conscious England; so, too, were the psychic wounds left by a stepfather and an “uncle” or two. Guinness channeled his adriftness into art, though the road was rocky: his first acting teacher offered to refund his tuition after a handful of lessons, sure that he would never amount to anything. She was wrong: inside a few years, Guinness was a member of the Old Vic troupe of Shakespearean actors, renowned throughout Europe for his Hamlet. Along the way, he became friendly with John Gielgud and other stage actors who adopted him as their own, and he met his wife Merula, who had much acting ability herself. Her career, though, was “a casualty of Alec’s meteoric rise to fame,” Read writes, inasmuch as Guinness was one of those no-wife-of-mine types, an odd blend of conservative and progressive. (Read offers that Guinness later defended himself by saying that his wife was simply too good for the theater.) Constantly worried about money—and, Read ventures, by matters of sexual identity—Guinness dirtied himself with film work, for which he had natural and abundant talents. Channeling Guinness, who kept notes and diaries, Read trades in exquisite gossip about David Lean, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and other actors and directors with whom he worked, closing with the Star Wars franchise, which Guinness found distasteful but which brought him the first real financial security he had known (“I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread”).
A solid if sometimes digressive portrait of a stoic, hardworking player, never really influential but certainly memorable.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4498-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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