Frenetically entertaining.
Film, video and commercial producer Oreck recalls her adventures as a pioneer in the music-video field.
A self-described “socialistically inclined ex–hippie chick,” the author grew up in California, got pregnant at 16 and held random jobs while taking film classes and yearning to become a movie producer. Rejected by top studios, she worked for years on low-budget genre movies. With the rise of MTV in 1981, she began her successful career as a Grammy Award–winning producer of rock videos for such performers as Mick Jagger, Metallica, Michael Jackson and Sting. Recounting one project after another, Oreck provides amusing, often biting glimpses of an array of hotties, druggies, incompetents and others who join with high-maintenance stars and pompous record-company executives to produce video promos for the latest song hits. Crises abound: Neighbors called the police when 20 crosses were set afire during a Madonna shoot; homeless cross-dressers pursued Janet Jackson on the streets of Los Angeles; and dozens of pigeons splattered on the ground after their release during the making of a Sheila E video. The author discusses her struggles to get along with a difficult business partner, her decision to not learn her personal assistant’s name until 90 days had passed without a drug- or felony-related incident, and her discovery that two longtime production assistants were dealing pot to celebrities. Oreck renders scenes and conversations vividly, displaying a remarkable gift for memory or invention, or perhaps both. In addition to describing her work at her boutique firm, O Pictures, she writes about her youthful stay at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers, where Miss Olive, the 400-pound assistant chef, insisted the girls eat like women, and fellow residents derided the author’s love for Joni Mitchell songs (“That is stupid white pussy shit”). Oreck’s memoir will leave many readers as exhausted as the author was when she closed her business several years ago, resolving never to produce another rock video or commercial.
Frenetically entertaining.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-986-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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