Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.
The life and times of the novelist, screenwriter, Hollywood mini-mogul and borderline workaholic.
Sheldon came from humble beginnings in Depression-era Chicago to become the brand-name author of airport bestsellers (Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 2004, etc.). Although this memoir mostly catalogues his successes, Sheldon begins by revealing that in 1934, when he was 17 and working at a drugstore, he was stealing sleeping pills so that he could commit suicide. Despondent that his life wasn’t going anywhere, he was determined to do the deed just as his father walked in on him. A born salesman, Otto Schechtel was able to talk his son out of it, but that seems about the last positive thing he did. Sheldon worked desperately to become successful, even changing his last name at the advice of a manager, and there’s some genuinely entertaining material here covering his ascension to film- and bestsellerdom. An impressive combination of chutzpah, writing talent and blind luck led him from Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood, where he was soon knocking out B-picture screenplays. Broadway shows followed, as did A-list picture credits (he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), and eventually Sheldon joined the ranks of megawatt producers. That whole business about his being the most-translated novelist in the world—he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records—comes later, more as an afterthought. It’s his success in the movie biz that Sheldon wants to talk about. Among other things, it’s an opportunity for name-dropping, a habit he overindulges in.
Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53267-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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