Admitting that she has been obsessed with Brando since she was a teenager, Mizruchi paints a sympathetic and respectful...
According to his latest biographer, Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was a voracious reader, social activist and insightful actor.
Mizruchi (English/Boston Univ.; The Rise of Multicultural America, 2008, etc.) bases her study on considerable new sources: Brando’s huge library of annotated books, film scripts and research notes, as well as interviews with friends and family members. “I can report,” she writes, “that Brando’s hunger for knowledge was as insatiable as his more legendary appetites for women and food.” She believes that Brando was a victim of sexism; his good looks and gossip about “the endless women and romantic affairs” led to his being stereotyped as an intellectual lightweight. Mizruchi argues that he was a serious student of philosophy, literature, history, and Western and Eastern religions. In the 1950s, as his reputation was established by performances in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront, his reading became “focused on three main areas: comparative philosophy and religion; Asian cultures, including their histories, languages, and arts; and social scientific theory (politics and psychology in particular).” His readings, Mizruchi asserts, influenced his choice of roles, in which he hoped to convey some social or political message. Although he was chided for outspoken political views that some deemed naïve, the author claims that Brando consciously “treated his celebrity as a means to public ends.” His causes included Native American rights, civil rights for African-Americans, UNICEF and the environment. Mizruchi chronicles Brando’s career, highlighting his deliberations over roles, his profuse annotations of scripts and his efforts to deeply understand his characters. Even when he took parts just for the money, “Brando sought to balance lucrative projects against those he did for idealistic purposes.”
Admitting that she has been obsessed with Brando since she was a teenager, Mizruchi paints a sympathetic and respectful portrait of a man far different from the self-absorbed, self-indulgent one who emerges in other biographies.Pub Date: June 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08286-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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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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