by Shirley MacLaine ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2011
A stale, disjointed collection of observations from a Hollywood legend.
With her latest release, Academy Award–winning actress MacLaine (Sage-ing While Age-ing, 2007, etc.) won’t remind readers why she's been so successful entertaining others. What begins as a memoir laid out in brief, anecdotal chapters on all that the author is “over” and “not over” rapidly descends into a jumbled mash-up of her personal beliefs on everything under the sun. Ranging from politics (“Terrorism is just a convenient excuse for those in power to gently instruct us to go quietly into that good night”) to good lighting (“You want the camera high and the key light low”), MacLaine jumps from subject to subject with such a rapid-fire pace that readers barely have a chance to keep up with her. The author is well-known for her humor, which makes an occasional appearance in this volume—“I am appalled at the number of people who are famous for doing absolutely nothing but being seen at parties”—and she provides brief moments of insight: "The studios don’t like to take risks anymore...They seem to be reflecting the fear experienced everywhere...these days.” But the author's strengths are offset by sections in which the author displays a lack of humility: “Those of us in show business sometimes call people who are not in show business ‘civilians’ because they don’t understand what is takes to be loved by being ‘really’ real...[we lead] civilians to water but never let them drink.” A book in midlife crisis.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0729-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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