It’s time for another top-drawer Bogart book. Maybe next time.
Former Time contributor Kanfer (Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, 2008, etc.) tackles the screen legend, last deeply examined in competing 1997 biographies by Jeffrey Meyers, and A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax.
The contours of the Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) story are already familiar. Son of a wealthy New York surgeon, he was a prep-school failure and Navy vet who drifted into acting through the good graces of a friend’s father, Broadway producer William Brady. After years as a male ingénue, he broke through as gunman Duke Mantee in the 1935 theatrical production of Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest. He flopped in Hollywood as a Fox contract player, but was signed by Warner Bros. after a sensational re-creation of his stage role. Following years playing ill-fated heavies on the Warner lot, Bogart finally made his mark in middle age as a tender-hearted hood in High Sierra (1941). Star-making, image-setting turns as detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and nightclub owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942) followed. The boozing, brawling, chain-smoking Bogie, veteran of three bad marriages, settled down with his teenaged co-star Lauren Bacall, survived a 1947 face-off with congressional Red hunters that threatened his career and collected an Oscar for The African Queen (1951). Already an icon, he died of cancer at 57 and secured a posthumous cult in the ’60s. Though Kanfer draws on past interviews with intimates to tell his story, he admits that he was hamstrung by the fact that few eyewitnesses survive. His slim volume, which leans heavily on plot synopses in the late going, is filled with make-weight quotes from memoirs and biographies. The author provides enough padding to stuff a comfortable sofa (enough with the Raymond Chandler quotations), brings little fresh perspective about Bogie’s creation of the sensitive screen tough guy and offers facile observations about the disappearance of adult archetypes in today’s youth-oriented movies.
It’s time for another top-drawer Bogart book. Maybe next time.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27100-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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