Whether you were well-acquainted with Fisher or not, this book will make you miss her.
An intimate and effusive tribute to Carrie Fisher (1956-2016).
Between traditional biography and commemorative journalism lies a place where facts meet fandom, where both casual observers and devotees alike can bear witness to an extraordinary life. Weller (The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News, 2014, etc.) could find those coordinates in her sleep. That’s not to say she didn’t work incredibly hard to pull together this endearing collection of stories about the late actor. The author is a seasoned veteran of panoramic storytelling; as a result, her narrative is occasionally almost as difficult to keep up with as Fisher herself. The book begins and ends with the fateful trans-Atlantic flight that signaled her impending death, but in between, readers have more than 300 pages to fall in love with the quirky, brilliant, outrageously witty woman who graced the silver screen as Princess Leia, among other roles. Weller interviewed scores of Fisher’s friends, former lovers, colleagues, and family members to shape a mostly chronological, highly detailed rendering of her life. The author dives deep into her subject’s childhood, films, books, marriages, friendships, and highly publicized battles with addiction and mental illness. The latter two elements provide some of the most poignant moments of the book, as readers get a revealing look at Fisher’s eventual acceptance of—and fierce honesty about—living with drug addiction and bipolar disorder. Occasionally, the dizzying array of quotes and voluminous backstories of Fisher’s friends and family get a bit taxing, and the book is brimming with gossipy tidbits. Regardless, Weller connects the dots in ways that create a vividly hued portrait. There is no monochrome here but rather an expansive look at a woman who lived large, loved deeply, and did a lot to destigmatize mental illness.
Whether you were well-acquainted with Fisher or not, this book will make you miss her.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28223-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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