A breezy, episodic series of autobiographical vignettes and musings on life by the Tony-winning dancer/choreographer/director. Yes, Tommy Tune is his real name, and he drops plenty of other famous ones, from Michael Bennett and Twiggy to Agnes De Mille and Gene Kelly, as he chronicles his odyssey from Texas tyke to Broadway triple-threat. His prose is often perilously folksy- -especially his annoying habit of reproducing the way he talks in words like ``whistlin' '' and ``fascinatin' ''—but, like his friend Carol Channing (portrayed with loving three-dimensionality), Tune is smarter than his public persona suggests. His thoughtful observations on everything from getting older (he's 58) to his tendency toward dead-end relationships give this book more depth than the usual show-biz memoir. Descriptions of his work as a performer (Seesaw, My One and Only, etc.) and director (Nine, Grand Hotel, etc.) are nicely specific (to use a favorite Tune adjective) and offer real insight into how musicals are collaboratively created. The author is generous with praise for coworkers like director Mike Nichols and designer Tony Walton, but frank about artistic disagreements, and merciless in airing personal grievances, as when Lucie Arnaz refused to kiss him onstage because she feared he might have AIDS or when a longtime boyfriend took him to a humiliating Christmas dinner at the apartment of the boyfriend's new lover. Tune is enthusiastically bisexual, and a couple of raunchy sex scenes may offend the squeamish. But his love for the theater and the people who give their lives to it makes this an engaging and occasionally touching work. Scrambled chronology and general vagueness about dates are in keeping with the casual tone. Waxing earthy and ethereal by turns, the six-foot-six Tune here lives up to his dancing teacher's admonition: ``Tommy, you've got your head in the clouds, be sure to keep your feet on the ground.'' (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84182-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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