by Susan Compo ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2009
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
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by Susan Compo
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 ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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