Graceful prose creates a richly detailed and poignant portrait, simultaneously inspiring and depressing.
The lushly researched life of celebrated dancer, choreographer and director (stage, films, TV) Bob Fosse (1927–1987).
Film critic and biographer Wasson (Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, 2010, etc.) has amassed a mountain of data about Fosse but has sculpted it into something moving and memorable. With chapters whose titles remind us of his approaching death (“Fifteen Years,” “Five Years,” “One Hour and Fifty-Three Minutes”), the author both increases the dramatic irony of the dancer’s days and reminds us continually of life’s evanescence. After a swift chapter about Fosse’s boyhood—for a long time, he concealed his dancing passion and skills)—Wasson guides us through his incredibly productive career (in a single year, 1973, he won a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy), providing engaging detail about his major productions—Sweet Charity, Pippin, Cabaret, Chicago, All That Jazz and others. Wasson shows us Fosse’s enormous empathy for his dancers, his ferocious work ethic, his reliance on uppers and cigarettes, and his constitutional inability to remain faithful to a single woman. His hotel room during productions was, well, a chorus line. A few resisted him (he never seemed to bear a grudge), and former wife, fellow choreographer and gifted dancer Gwen Verdon remained in his orbit to the absolute end—she was with him when he collapsed on the street. We see, too, his close friendships (Paddy Chayefsky, E.L. Doctorow), his rivalries (Michael Bennett) and his friendly rivals (Jerome Robbins). The author also reveals a deeply insecure artist who wanted to be a writer and was always certain his productions would fail—and, in the late cases of Big Deal and Star 80, he was certainly correct.
Graceful prose creates a richly detailed and poignant portrait, simultaneously inspiring and depressing.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-55329-0
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
How Book Adaptations Fared at Golden Globe Noms
BOOK TO SCREEN
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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