A nostalgic recollection of the great beauty's movies and memories.
The award-winning actress and international sex symbol tells her life story, from her childhood in Naples, Italy, to her rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
In this occasionally revealing memoir, Loren (Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories, 1998, etc.) opens her "treasure trove of memories.” She is amusing and engaging when discussing her teenage ambition to be a star. She participated in beauty pageants (in one, she earned a "Miss Eleganza" sash) and became a popular model in Italian "photo-romance" novels before beginning her career as a movie actress. However, when she chronicles her relationship with Italian film producer Carlo Ponti—who brought her to the United States and helped make her an international star—Loren’s directness evaporates and the narrative falters. She describes Ponti as "a determined businessman" and an “authoritative gentleman,” but she gives only glancing acknowledgement of his wife and two small children—not to mention the fact that he was 39 and she was only 17 when their affair began. (To modern ears, the charges Ponti's family later brought against the couple for "bigamy and concubinage" will seem archaic.) Along with her blithe dismissal of inconvenient facts, Loren repeatedly describes herself as a shy woman of high moral character; as proof, she haughtily reveals the story behind the infamous photo of her staring at Jayne Mansfield's deep neckline at a Hollywood party in 1957—Loren claims she was scandalized and "terrified" because "one of her breasts [was] in my plate.” Throughout, Loren earnestly tells her many stories in the sentimental and often amused voice of "Nonna Sofia,” though without much scrutiny or a sharp wit. A short appendix lists each of the author’s acting roles by year.
A nostalgic recollection of the great beauty's movies and memories.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476797427
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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