Clooney, who went from being one of popular music’s original divas to America’s sweetheart, unfurls her dramatic life story, aided by Barthel (A Death in California, 1981, etc.). Clooney started out in Maysville, Ky., where she and her brother, Nicky, and her sister, Betty, bounced around from family home to family home. Her parents separated often, leading the three children to spend time with uncles and aunts, but mostly their grandparents. Because of their unfortunate circumstances, the kids, particularly the two sisters, bonded tightly from an early age, and they started their professional singing careers as a sister act. When Rosemary got her first significant gig, with Tony Pastor’s band in 1939, Betty was right there with her. Some of the book’s most vibrant passages come from the era long before Clooney was a household name, when she and Betty were on their first major tour with Pastor’s band. You can feel their teenage excitement over having gotten out of their small town. The most poignant part comes when Clooney writes of her painful decision to leave her Uncle George (who chaperoned the girls) and Betty behind when she was offered her big break. Clooney’s early life, which has been much less well-documented than her marriage to actor JosÇ Ferrer and her addiction to prescription drugs, offers the book’s most sincere and moving moments. From the time she reaches true stardom, Girl Singer bounds into sometimes clichéd Hollywood melodrama, beginning with her troubled marriage, on through her many well-known friendships (from Bing Crosby to Ava Gardner), to her fall from grace, and culminating with her “90s comeback, which has seen her nominated for multiple Grammy awards, and her realization of a lifelong dream to play Carnegie Hall. However, those first chapters, and her obvious love for her family, offer such genuine, and often sweet, insight into one of America’s most famous personalities that Girl Singer is a must for anyone with even a passing curiosity about Clooney. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49334-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
