Interesting, if not exactly compelling. The subtitle could be “You Had to Be There.”
An encore from the biggest Cold War celebrity you've never heard of.
Every Soviet citizen has a soft spot for an American named Reed, a charismatic, handsome, idealistic fellow traveler who wined, dined and serenaded the eastern Bloc, and then died, too young. This is not John Reed, played by Warren Beatty in the 1981 cinematic saga Reds. This is Dean Reed, a corn-fed son of Colorado. This is a messy but rollicking account of Reed's adventures behind the Iron Curtain and the mysterious death that landed him in a simple grave outside East Berlin. The author, journalist and documentary filmmaker Nadelson, first learned of Reed from a 60 Minutes segment in 1986. She, along with half the female population of the Soviet Union and the GDR, fell hard for the handsome crooner and embarked on a decade-long quest to piece together his life story. She taps the usual line-up—wives, girlfriends, translators and mom—as well as a weird span of authorities from rock-’n’-roll legend Phil Everly to the ubiquitous wonk of perestroika, Vladimir Pozner. Everly sums up Reed's international fame as “the real thing.” Pozner offers a more sanguine perspective: “They thought they bought the Beatles and they didn't even buy Pat Boone.” Nadelson's account was originally published in the U.K. in 1991. The American edition, spurred by Hollywood's notice—Tom Hanks and DreamWorks hold the film rights—has been updated with details Nadelson uncovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The definitive answer to how Reed managed to drown in a lake near his German suburban home (“The Dude Ranch of Schmockwitz,” as Nadelson dubs it) remains elusive. The unlikely story of his life as a razzle-dazzle flier in the Socialist jet set endures.
Interesting, if not exactly compelling. The subtitle could be “You Had to Be There.”Pub Date: June 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1555-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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