Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.
Diligently reconstructed life story of a man who readily laughed off lables like “bounder” and “cad” while elevating that of “Latin lover” to both art form and profession.
Porfirio Rubirosa was born in 1909 to a militarist adventurer who instilled in him the code of tiguerismo (ultimate Dominican machismo). His fate was sealed by his being sent, a failed high-school student, to France for academic rehabilitation—and then some. Levy, film critic for the Portland Oregonian and chronicler of mega-celebrities (Rat Pack Confidential, 1998), tracks “Rubi” through the nighteries and brothels of Paris, then back to his impoverished home island, where he dared dance, sans permission, with the daughter of the Dominican Republic’s emergent dictator, Rafael Trujillo, as a young lieutenant (albeit with connections) at a military ball. Even El Benefactor (one of the Caribbean’s cruelest despots) knew the girl was enthralled by the cosmopolitan bon vivant and shortly blessed their marriage. It wouldn’t last; neither would those with French actress Danielle Darrieux or American multimillionaire heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, but it set Rubi up as a vague Dominican diplomatic fixture for decades. “I can’t work,” he once told a reporter, “because I don’t have time for it.” Meanwhile, women came, in the off-hours of his various marriages, and fell, including Christina Onassis, Eva Perón and Zsa Zsa Gabor. According to Levy, Rubirosa’s basic attitude was reflected in a comment on his father’s tendency to have illegitimate children: “My mother got fat,” he explained. During World War II, he sold Dominican visas to European Jews for up to $5,000 each, but professed to be far more interested in spending money than making it. When he fatally crashed his Ferrari in 1965 after a night of revelry, the money was almost gone. A fitting end, most said, including his then wife, French actress Odile Rodin, half his age.
Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-00-717059-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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