For diehard fans only.
Charming but insubstantial memoir from the most prolific James Bond.
Moore, who stewarded the Bond franchise through its arguably most frivolous series of films, recounts his life in a similarly breezy manner, with a relentless chirpiness that eventually begins to lull the reader into a pleasant stupor. Moore dutifully catalogs his cozy early childhood, wartime deprivations, early career, etc., in an agreeably light, jokey tone, reveling in a scatological sense of humor and displaying a talent for the well-turned anecdote. This same jocular, weightless approach extends to the author’s reminiscences of failed marriages, serious illnesses and other major life events. Moore takes us through the production of The Saint and The Persuaders (with some choice stories about eccentric, pot-smoking co-star Tony Curtis), which set the stage for his signature role as James Bond. There are plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits about the making of his Bond films, mostly on the order of stunt snafus and pranks. Moore shows little willingness to gossip about his co-stars—though he includes a poignant curio about Hervé Villechaize’s whoring in Hong Kong—and no inclination to analyze the character of Bond, noting only that his take on the character was “lighter” than predecessor Sean Connery’s. No kidding. Moore seems oddly oblivious to any notions of artistic quality, fondly recalling his work in such universally reviled films as The Cannonball Run and Boat Trip without irony, and evinces little interest in the craft of acting beyond having a nice time with fun people and cashing a big check. Fair enough, as he reserves his passion for UNICEF, which despite being noble makes for very dull reading.
For diehard fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-167388-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
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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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