by Sheila MacRae with H. Paul Jeffers ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1992
MacRae tells of life with her glamorous husband, the alcoholic singer/gambler Gordon. Sheila and Gordon, who married young, were known for years as ``The Malted Milk Kids'' because of their clean living. A relative of famed actress Madame Sarah Siddons (in All About Eve, cunning Anne Baxter receives ``the Sarah Siddons award'') and renowned Shakespearean John Philip Kemble, Sheila gave up a promising acting career when she married Gordon and gave birth to four children. Gordon thought himself the world's greatest singer but turned down a career in grand opera to triumph in musicals, his greatest role being Curly in Oklahoma. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a drink, took to gambling, made nuttily huge bets on the turn of a card, and brought down the IRS on his and Sheila's heads. Bit by bit, Gordon fell apart. Sheila joined him in a lounge act but often had to go on alone or call in a celebrity replacement. At last, on the advice of Lucille Ball, Sheila separated from Gordon but for five more years could not commit herself to divorce. She found herself being talked into bed by JFK and later LBJ, and refused on both occasions, but apparently did become lovers for a long period with Frank Sinatra, who wanted to marry her, and with an anonymous ``Jewish Prince of Comedy.'' Meanwhile, Gordon tried AA, dropped out, but nonetheless wound up on the National Council on Alcoholism while maintaining—even on his deathbed—that he wasn't an alcoholic. Sheila went on to become the last Alice Kramden when Jackie's Gleason's Honeymooners became a TV musical series. Familiar but readable operatics among the supertalented and well paid as Sheila, here writing with veteran Jeffers (Who Killed Precious?, 1991, etc.) seeks her identity. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-112-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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