Luce once contracted to write her autobiography, which she planned to call The Dream of My Life. Morris perceptively reveals...
The second volume in the life of a significant American figure.
By the time she was 40, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) had been an actress, Broadway playwright, war correspondent, managing editor of Vanity Fair and Republican congresswoman from Connecticut. Married to the enormously wealthy publisher Henry Luce (Life, Time, Sports Illustrated et al.), she went on to become the first woman ambassador (to Italy, appointed by Eisenhower) and, after her conversion to Catholicism, author of several books on religion. Luce held political views passionately: A fierce anti-communist, she was equally outspoken in support of civil rights for African-Americans. Morris (Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Booth Luce, 1997, etc.) earned Luce’s trust and access to more than 460,000 items in the restricted Luce Collection at the Library of Congress. Blonde, beautiful and glamorous (Morris includes details about Luce’s sumptuous wardrobe at every occasion), she took many lovers, with a special preference for men in uniform. Her “compulsion to charm” was, writes the author, “a drive more for devotion than sex. She wanted to conquer all comers, even though her interest in them could be short-lived.” And conquer she did: Both men and women succumbed, with the notable exceptions of Harry Truman, who refused to receive her at the White House, and Cyrus Sulzberger, chief foreign correspondent of the New York Times, who “was appalled” by her “arrogant conceit” and “ruthlessly hard-boiled self-assurance.” Luce’s frenzied need to engage in all-consuming work was fueled by a daily round of stimulants and sedatives; she fell into black depressions and paranoia, especially if she felt rejected or ignored. Desperately, she needed to be the center of attention.
Luce once contracted to write her autobiography, which she planned to call The Dream of My Life. Morris perceptively reveals the nightmare in this evenhanded and intimate portrait.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-679-45711-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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