An entertaining but slight merger of social and personal history, via the lens of popular culture.
Amusing fusion of memoir and cultural critique, focusing on the family saga none of us could refuse.
Broadway theater manager Santopietro (Sinatra in Hollywood, 2008, etc.) asserts that with the 1972 release of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, “notions of ethnicity in America had been upended in rather spectacular fashion” especially for young Italian-Americans who felt conflicted about many aspects of their heritage, including a stifling emphasis on family ties, love for America paired with distrust of authority and, of course, a convenient stereotype of pervasive criminal involvement. The author claims that it was his early viewings of the film and its sequels that revealed to him “just what had transpired in my grandfather’s leap to L’America,” allowing him to transition into a family history in which his grandparents settled in Waterbury, Conn., around 1917, where the effects of anti-immigrant prejudice were evident despite the Italian community’s established local roots. Since his most of his mother’s family were locally prominent WASPs, this resulted in an embarrassed confusion regarding his upbringing and inner identity. His narrative shifts between this personal history and an examination of the production and impact of the three Godfather films. He discusses many intriguing aspects of the original production, including studio resistance to Coppola and the actors Al Pacino and Marlon Brando (their indelible performances notwithstanding), and the long-rumored presence of actual mobsters on the set. He also explores other relevant cultural tangents, such as the many shoddy pastiches of mob culture (and some good ones, like The Sopranos) and the transformative impact of unapologetic paisano Frank Sinatra. The writing is slick, and most engaging when Santopietro looks back nostalgically at his personal history, but many of the observations drawn about the Godfather trilogy’s effect on American society since then seem familiar.
An entertaining but slight merger of social and personal history, via the lens of popular culture.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00513-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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