Belletti, alas, was a prosaic stylist, but her ingenuous point of view lends her stories charm.
Snapshots from Hollywood’s early days.
The film business may have boomed in the 1920s, but Samuel Goldwyn’s secretary Valeria Belletti still had enough down time to get off long letters to lifelong friend Irma Prima back in New York City. Belletti’s correspondence survives, presented here with film scholar and author Beauchamp filling in background notes on some of the films and filmmakers Belletti mentioned to her friend. Belletti wrote to Irma that she approached Goldwyn with trepidation since he had a reputation for being a terror. Mrs. Goldwyn soon told Valeria the mogul liked her—after all, hadn’t he entrusted her to order bootleg booze for one of his parties? Belletti also got to know the stars on the Goldwyn lot—Ronald Coleman, Rudolph Valentino and an awkward, shy young actor she insisted Goldwyn hire, Gary Cooper. (Her potential courtship with Cooper faded as he headed to stardom.) Belletti also told her friend what was happening on and off the set. Especially poignant is an anecdote about Belle Bennett, who arrived to play the eagerly sought title role in Stella Dallas on the same day her teenaged son died of a sports injury. A single mother, Bennett had told people the boy was her brother. Writing about her personal life, Belletti often falls into a dullish “I’m fine/how are you” tone. However Bohemian her friends may have been, their behavior never rivaled that of their often scandalous Hollywood neighbors. “We sat in front of a big fireplace,” Belletti writes of an afternoon tea, “and had an enjoyable afternoon.”
Belletti, alas, was a prosaic stylist, but her ingenuous point of view lends her stories charm.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-520-24551-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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