MacLaine is wickedly honest about moviemaking, sincere and enthusiastic in describing her beliefs, and welcoming in the...
The award-winning actress reflects on her latest film and her previous life.
MacLaine, a talented woman who believes in reincarnation, is getting a lot out of this life. She’s acted in more than 50 films and written 14 books, including this one. At 81, she’s acting in another film and writing a book about it. Wild Oats (2016), a screwball comedy about an elderly woman (MacLaine) who mistakenly receives a very large social security check and decides to take her friend (Jessica Lange) on a lavish vacation, was over five years in the making and $500,000 in debt before it even started shooting in the Canary Islands, which some believed “were the remnants of Atlantis.” After the musical chairs of finalizing actors and director and with funding somewhat secured, the cast was flown to the island’s opulent Lopesan resort, and her “adventure” began. She writes in a jaunty, casual, daily diary style, providing affectionate portraits of her fellow actors: Billy Connolly (in one scene, “he made me laugh so hard, I nearly developed a herniated disk), Lange (“beautiful, intense, and a brilliant dramatic actress”), Demi Moore (sweet…and nervous”), and Howard Hesseman (“adorably funny”).” MacLaine was constantly anxious about the ongoing efforts to raise funds, calling it “amateur hour,” and at one point worried, “Why am I here? Are we going to shoot a movie…or ourselves?” However, it ended well: “It had all been worth it to me for so many reasons.” The author’s insider’s portrait of the moviemaking world sparkles, but it’s dimmer when she engages in her New Age ruminations (“I feel that I am in alignment with my soul’s destiny”).
MacLaine is wickedly honest about moviemaking, sincere and enthusiastic in describing her beliefs, and welcoming in the skepticism of others—it’s all refreshing and fun.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3641-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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