Author of an acclaimed biography of Ernst Lubitsch (1991) and a well-regarded history of the coming of the talkies (The Speed of Sound, 1996), Eyman takes on an even bigger piece of film history: the career of John Ford. Ford was not merely a man of contradictions—a voracious reader and a student of literature and American history who disdained intellectuals, a gruff personal reactionary who was a lifelong liberal Democrat, a cinematic poet of family unity who was a terrible parent—he was an out-and-out enigma, even to those closest to him. As Eyman notes early in this lengthy book, “The point was to never let anybody know who the real John Ford was.” To that end, Ford left a genial legacy of lies, half-truths, and fantasies he spun for interviewers and would-be biographers. One of the greatest strengths of this excellent book is that Eyman finally unravels the skeins of legend to reveal the truth about Ford’s background. Legend: Ford went to the University of Maine on a football scholarship. Fact: Ford never went to college after graduating from Portland High. Legend: Ford stumbled unwittingly into the movie business. Fact: Ford came out to Hollywood to join his older brother Francis, already a silent-film star and director, and was eager to break into the film industry. Legend: Ford did all his cutting in the camera, shooting only the footage he needed to make a scene. Fact: almost true, but Ford did shoot “coverage” (alternate camera angles of a scene to be used in the editing process) on occasion. Eyman has drawn on Ford’s personal papers, his letters and notebooks, and hundreds of interviews to create the most balanced and complete portrait yet of the director of The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Although at times inelegantly written, this is as definitive a biography as we are likely to get of one of America’s greatest filmmakers. (b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-81161-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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