by Stefan Kanfer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2000
A highly competent but finally rather troubling work.
As a historian of the Borscht Belt and of animated film (Serious Business, 1997), Kanfer would seem to be a good match for the verbally adroit Marx.
By now, the story of how stage mom extraordinaire Minnie Marx pushed her five sons into vaudeville stardom, with an eventual graduation to Broadway and Hollywood, is a familiar one. Feckless father Sam and hypercompetent Minnie and famous uncle Al Shean—this story has been told before many times, but by focusing on Groucho, Kanfer manages to give a somewhat different emphasis to these twice (and more) told tales. Julius (alias Groucho) was the odd man out—literally—as the middle child of five, party to neither the intimacies of his older brothers (Chico and Harpo) nor the younger ones (Gummo and Zeppo). Forced out of school at 13 by his mother (to make up for the income that Chico gambled away), Groucho would often find solace in books and in the peace and quiet that was utterly alien to the Marx Brothers' public image. Ironically, it was the intensely private Groucho who would be one of the first of the family to go on to the Vaudeville circuit. Kanfer is at his best recounting the slow rise to fame of the Brothers; he also shows how the romanticized version of the family history hides a darker reality. Regrettably, however, in the book's second half, that darker reality becomes the dominant tone and, in the chapters covering Groucho's agonizingly unpleasant decline into senescence, things get ugly indeed. A terrific father to small children, Groucho was a dreadful paterfamilias to adults and a nightmarish husband. Kanfer doesn't stint on the hard truths, ranging from sexual inadequacy to bladder trouble, some of which we might well have done without.
A highly competent but finally rather troubling work.Pub Date: May 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40218-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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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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 ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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