In this engrossing tribute to her parents, the author provides a thoughtfully documented portrait of early Hollywood. A...
An affectionate portrait of two early Hollywood film legends.
In this captivating dual biography and memoir, Riskin—a former president of the Writers Guild of America West and former director of Human Rights Watch—recounts the colorful lives, hardworking careers, and loving but sadly foreshortened marriage of her parents, actress Fay Wray (1907-2004) and screenwriter/playwright Robert Riskin (1897-1955). Wray is best remembered for her iconic role in the 1933 classic King Kong. Though many of her other films are less memorable, during the 1930s she was one of the most prolific actresses of her day. Riskin made an indelible mark as a screenwriter for several significant films of that same period, most in collaboration with director Frank Capra, including It Happened One Night, for which Riskin won an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. Wray and Riskin both came from humble origins. One of six children, she “came from pioneer stock” in Utah; he was one of five children brought up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Both were well-established in their careers before meeting in 1940: Wray was at Paramount, Riskin at Columbia Pictures. Wray had been married previously and had a young daughter. Riskin, in his early 40s, had avoided marriage but had serious involvements with severable notable women, including Carole Lombard. Their eventual marriage would enrich both their lives but was short-lived. Riskin suffered a stroke in 1950 that left him unable to write for the remainder of his life. In alternating chapters, the author traces their careers and shares lively stories of their personal journeys. The narrative is enhanced by richly detailed descriptions of that period, as the author offers fresh insights into the studio system and many of the key players. Much has been previously written about Capra as well as studio moguls such as Harry Cohn; Riskin provides further nuance and context for how these and other industry talents operated.
In this engrossing tribute to her parents, the author provides a thoughtfully documented portrait of early Hollywood. A must-read for fans of this era of film history.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4728-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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