Bogart was only eight when his famous father died; now that he's a grown-up, a published author (Play It Again, 1995), and a TV producer, he is ready to confront the legend. As a young man, Stephen Bogart was troubled by the fame of his father; he felt abandoned after the actor's premature death at 57 and oppressed by his equally famous mother's enshrining of Bogie's memory. When MomLauren Bacall (who will contribute the book's forward)urged him to learn about his father, Stephen resisted mightily, ``fleeing my father's ghost at every turn.'' Now an adult with kids of his own, Stephen is ready to confront his family past, and this biography of Bogieas much about Stephen's growing up as about his father's life and careeris the result. The book opens by paraphrasing the sappy pop song ``Key Largo'': ``When I was a kid I had it all. Just like Bogie and Bacall. In fact, I had them, too.'' It's a bad omen. The author in fact has little to add to the already familiar story of his father's roots in wealth, rebellion against his parents, ups and downs on Broadway, sputtering Hollywood career, and eventual skyrocketing takeoff with High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca. He repeats some familiar anecdotes about his old man's excessive drinking and needling wit, talks to some of his cronies, and offers us the results in artless, flat prose that does nothing to engage the reader. Bogart contributes nothing to our knowledge of his father's films, his politics, his sex life, or his marriage to Bacall. He spends entirely too much time making inappropriate comparisons between his father's habits, beliefs, and conduct and his own. A memoir clearly written to exorcise some personal ghosts. (First printing of 125,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93987-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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