A likable but inessential showbiz memoir.
The cult favorite looks back.
Perlman, the veteran character actor perhaps best known for his starring roles in TV’s Sons of Anarchy and the Hellboy film franchise, recounts his life and career in an engagingly off-the-cuff manner. Unfortunately, the details of his personal life aren’t particularly noteworthy, and his admirable focus on positivity renders most of his showbiz anecdotes rather bland. The exception is his amusingly baffled account of the filming of the notoriously troubled remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau, which was essentially hijacked by the inscrutable and monumentally frustrating star Marlon Brando—for whom the author expresses boundless affection and respect. Perlman is candid about insecurities regarding his unique looks and oddly paced career—in which unusual properties, such as the caveman epic Quest for Fire, the medieval mystery The Name of the Rose and the hit supernatural soap Beauty and the Beast, would lead to enormous buzz followed by long periods of unemployment as Hollywood struggled to consistently service the difficult-to-categorize actor whose appearance changed radically from project to project—but the book would have benefitted from a greater emphasis on the creation of Perlman’s cult favorites and less on his personal emotional struggles. Still, the actor’s voice, full of casual profanity, vintage hipster slang and an endearing tendency to overreach with elevated vocabulary, is as distinctive as his craggy features and imposing screen presence. He’s good company on the page, and fans may wish for further musings on the stories behind the vivid monsters he has so memorably brought to the screen. In closing, he writes, “just so I get off on the right foot, here’s a little tip for you talent out there: make sure your people show you everything that is offered.”
A likable but inessential showbiz memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-306-82344-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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