An intriguing, honest look at the hidden side of Hollywood.
In this debut memoir, entertainment journalist Merrill recalls her decadeslong career as an interviewer of Hollywood’s brightest stars.
When Merrill was growing up in 1950s Baltimore, she thought that her only strength was her pretty face and that her only option was to marry well. After she ended up a divorced mother of two by the age of 25, she decided to take her life in her own hands and turned her camera-ready face and love of talking into a career—first as an Emmy Award–winning local talk show host and later, as an entertainment journalist. Merrill interviewed numerous celebrities for short video profiles that were then distributed to television stations around the country to publicize movies. She shares anecdotes about her intimate conversations with such luminaries as Paul Newman, Jimmy Stewart, Tom Hanks and Cher. Her career eventually took her to film sets around the world, including a bleak Russian hotel where she had to barter Marlboros and Tootsie Rolls to get the electrical wiring fixed. However, Merrill’s story isn’t all name-dropping and globe-trotting. The author’s honesty is impressive, as she delves into her desperate search for a husband after her divorce, her sugar addiction that drastically affected her appearance and behavior, and her stubborn belief that she was always right. She tells it all with a drive that will leave readers with little doubt about how she became successful. However, although her voice makes her an engaging storyteller, it doesn’t always make her likable; some remarks about women in Hollywood, however truthful they may be, come off as rather sexist (“they could get away with their bitchiness as long as some powerful man protected them”), and her frequent use of “fat” as an insult may offend some readers. Nonetheless, Merrill’s willingness to admit her mistakes is refreshing, and her tales from the film-publicity trenches are consistently engaging.
An intriguing, honest look at the hidden side of Hollywood.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490314808
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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