Morris dishes the fascinating dirt on—and logs the remarkable accomplishments of—this controversial author, social climber, magazine editor, athlete, foreign correspondent, and trophy wife. Most people these days know Clare Boothe Luce as the author of the acid-tongued movie classic The Women, which made Jungle Red nail polish a synonym for social intrigue and betrayal. Morris (Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 1980), who had access to Luce in the last years of her life and to the letters, journals, and documents that Luce kept from her adolescence, blends the killer nail color with a more subtle palette in a complex portrait of an intelligent, ambitious, and multi-faceted woman who was also beautiful, charming, witty, and always elegantly turned out. However, there was no silver spoon in Clare's mouth when she was born in 1903, the illegitimate child of an upwardly striving young mother, who at some point in Luce's childhood probably earned a living as a call girl. That interfered with the quest of neither mother nor daughter for wealthy, well-connected partners. Clare's first husband was rich, social, alcoholic George Brokaw. After their divorce, she begged a job from magazine publisher CondÇ Nast. Within a few years she was managing editor of Vanity Fair, a playwright, essayist, and the object of Henry Luce's desire. Married to Luce, she went on to become a war correspondent, filing reports for the new Life magazine. The controversy surrounding her often obscured the fact that she was a talented writer and an astute, if sometimes venomous, reporter. Lap up Volume I, with its intimate and sometimes contradictary detail: Clare Boothe Luce, her Vionnet dresses fitted in Paris, as feminist icon. Watch for Volume II—Clare as congresswoman and US ambassador. (45 b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-394-57555-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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