A painstakingly detailed account of the long and bitter battle over the American stage adaptation of Anne Frank's famous diary. Melnick, a religion instructor at Williston Northampton School, has sifted through thousands of pages of correspondence and legal briefs to trace how novelist Meyer Levin shepherded the diary to an American publisher, gave it prominence with a New York Times review, first suggested it be adapted for Broadway in 1951, and wrote a faithful theatrical version. However, Otto Frank, Anne's assimilationist father, was persuaded to reject his version in favor of the husband-and-wife team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and producer Kermit Bloomgarden. All three were close to Lillian Hellman, who helped with the last few of the eight drafts of the play. Although the production was a major success and earned a Pulitzer, Melnick convincingly demonstrates that Levin was fully justified in his charge that they de-Judaized Anne Frank's diary. For example, Anne's words, ``Perhaps through Jewish suffering, the world will learn good,'' were revised in the play to ``Jews were not the only ones who suffered from the Nazis.'' Melnick also documents how unrelenting the playwrights and producer were in ``suppressing'' Levin's play, which first saw the light of day in the US in a 1972 student production. Melnick also recounts how the Levin-Hellman feud became entangled in the politics of McCarthyism. Finally, the reader is shown how Levin's three-decade-long crusade tyrannized his own life; at one point, Melnick reveals, Levin's long-suffering wife, Tereska, feeling she had lost her husband to his endless vendetta, tried to drown herself in the Hudson. Melnick's impressively documented work is a resounding refutation of Lawrence Graver's 1995 anti-Levin An Obsession with Anne Frank. But the author's almost blow-by-blow account of the long dispute will limit its accessibility to only the hardiest of Anne Frank, Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, or American theater aficionados.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06907-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
