In keeping with celebrity autobiographies, Redgrave offers a tell-all memoir—except that the passions she reveals are for politics, not sex. Theater and film star, daughter and mother of famous actors, Redgrave writes about her life, her craft, and her very controversial politics. But where other actors grow tiresome in describing their love lives, Redgrave does the same in talking about her 20-year affair with the Marxist Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary Party. And instead of spicing her book with nasty comments about fellow artists, she directs her bile toward capitalists, imperialists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and, of course, Zionists. Of all the controversial causes with which Redgrave has been associated, she is best known—and, in some circles, most hated—for her antipathy toward Zionism and support for the Palestinians. Redgrave offers no apologies here for any of her political beliefs, nor does she express any regrets for the many roles, especially in Hollywood and on Broadway, that she has lost because of her activism, particularly on behalf of the Palestinians. Redgrave, who has refused for years to talk to journalists about her politics, uses this book to present her case, and it is as much a treatise as a memoir. The politics often stop the flow of the book, especially when she segues from a fascinating discussion of how she played a certain role to a tedious discourse on such a topic as dialectic materialism—the movie Isadora gives way to the war in Vietnam, Macbeth to her Hollywood lectures on Marxism. Overall, however, Redgrave's sincerity overwhelms both skepticism and boredom. The result is a book that should fascinate anyone who cares about how an artist's inner life illuminates and motivates his or her work. Redgrave's central premise is that she would not have been half the actor she is if she had led a different life. She makes this case so convincingly that the reader is left wanting to go back and see every part she has played—more often than not brilliantly—with the new eye this book provides.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40216-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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