An informative, welcome portrait of an underappreciated American icon.
Never quite a star, actor’s actor Warren Oates gets his due in a lively biography.
Compo (Professional Writing/Univ. of Southern California; Pretty Things, 2001, etc.) delivers an affectionate history of Oates, an eccentric screen presence with a devoted cult following who, despite the universal regard of his directors and fellow actors, never attained the star status of buddies such as Jack Nicholson and Steve McQueen. Born in rural Depoy, Ky., a directionless Oates began to pursue acting in earnest after a stint in the Marines. He quickly found steady, if unglamorous, work in the live TV dramas produced in New York in the 1950s before moving to Los Angeles and building a career as a quintessential “working actor,” appearing in countless westerns and developing a persona as an uncouth, often menacing, yet somehow sympathetic oddball. Compo provides ample evidence of Oates’s preternatural geniality—the homely actor attracted a slew of gorgeous women (marrying several of them) armed only with a gap-toothed smile and an irresistible personal charisma. These qualities caught the attention of legendary auteur Sam Peckinpah, who cast Oates in important roles in a number of major films, including Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch and the controversial Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Oates won critical raves for these performances, as well as for his work in such seminal films as In the Heat of the Night and Badlands. Compo notes Oates’s many romantic entanglements, financial problems and chronic drug and alcohol abuse, but the author creates an impression of the man as a largely passive figure (he often touted his “zen”) looking for a good time rather than a driven hell-raiser in the Peckinpah mold. Shortly before his death, Oates won a new generation of fans with his performance as Sgt. Hulka in the Bill Murray vehicle Stripes, scoring perhaps the biggest laugh in the movie with his delivery of the line, “Lighten up, Francis.”
An informative, welcome portrait of an underappreciated American icon.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8131-2536-7
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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