An uneven, rushed-through life with occasional high notes.
A biography of Gloria Swanson (1899–1983), who was difficult, vain, arrogant and self-deluded, as well as shrewd, stylish and magnetic. She was, by her own account, “every inch and every moment a star.”
Swanson had limited gifts in terms of looks and talents. Barely 5 feet tall and, by her own description, stout, she had a pleasant singing voice, but stage fright kept her from pursuing a career as an opera diva or theater actress. The Chicago-raised daughter of an itinerant Swedish-American Army officer and a Polish-American mother whose poor judgment occasionally brought unwelcome publicity, Swanson began acting in the late 1910s for the local Essanay movie company. Finding that she liked the work—especially the money it brought her, as well as the men in front of and behind the cameras—she eventually wound up in Hollywood, where she was “discovered” by Mack Sennett, in whose comedies she first gained public notice. But it was Cecil B. DeMille who made Swanson a star. More than any other actress, Swanson, with her mentor DeMille, created the image of the movie star as fashion-plated glamour queen, both on screen and off. Her high-life style attracted wealthy men and aristocrats, including a French marquis whom she married and Joseph P. Kennedy. Shearer (Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life, 2011, etc.), who relied on Swanson’s fib-telling 1981 biography, newspaper and magazine articles, and a collection of her papers at the University of Texas, warms up to his subject about halfway through, in time for the amazing story of her comeback (some might convincingly argue, the capstone of her entire career) in Sunset Boulevard. A mysteriously aloof cipher in the early chapters, she eventually comes to life as a delightfully zestful grande dame, despite numerous personal and professional failures before and after Sunset.
An uneven, rushed-through life with occasional high notes.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00155-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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