An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.
Portland Oregonian film critic Levy (The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa, 2005, etc.) reckons with the life and work of one of the last great Hollywood icons.
Newman (1925–2008), notes the author, was well-loved for his waggish, self-deprecating charm, his philanthropy and his longtime marriage to actress Joanne Woodward. Of course, the actor also fascinated with his preternatural physical beauty, a fact that haunted him throughout the course of his career and, Levy suggests, was a key factor in his approach to his craft. Newman couldn’t claim credit for his naturally athletic physique or piercing blue eyes, but he could take satisfaction in diligent study and old-fashioned hard work. He was not an obvious natural talent in his early forays into the field—begun while a student at Kenyon College—but rather a beautiful, magnetic charmer, a dilettante reluctant to join his family’s prosperous sporting-goods company. That he achieved his status as a master film actor is a testament to sweaty, unglamorous effort and a mania for rehearsal and script analysis, fed by his participation in the Actors Studio. It often drove collaborators to distraction but slowly paid off in a series of indelible roles in films such as The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). Levy charts Newman’s evolving screen persona, from brash, cocky callowness to irreverent roguishness to gravelly authority, but the author is equally interested in Newman’s storied auto-racing career and philanthropic enterprises, including his charity gourmet-food business and his Hole in the Wall Gang camps for seriously ill children. This industry and energy, along with the boyish love of pranks and dirty jokes, the compulsive self-puncturing of his legend, the devotion to Woodward and the stubborn integrity all reveal an unusually integrated personality so ineffably right for his métier that mere mortals could only look on in wonder and delight.
An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-35375-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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
