A serviceable reference for fans and moviegoers.
Every fact has its day, but insights are rare in this comprehensive yet lackluster biography of the recently knighted actor by a veteran British celebrity chronicler.
Caine’s life, a quintessential rags-to-riches story, is potentially interesting, even dramatic. Born Maurice Micklewhite in 1933, he was a London Cockney with an accent to match. His father was unemployed during the Depression, and his mother worked as a cleaning lady to support the family. Now Sir Michael Caine lives in suitable style in upscale Surrey. But the passage to stardom and money was rocky. Until he was 30, Caine played mostly small, often non-speaking parts in plays, movies, and TV shows. His career took off when he was given the role of a British officer in the 1963 movie epic Zulu. The part meant money, recognition, and, best of all, more parts—and Hall lists them all: the good, the bad, and the best forgotten. The author extensively describes such great hits as Alfie, Sleuth, The Man Who Would Be King, and the two movies that won him Oscars: Hannah and Her Sisters and Cider House Rules. Caine’s early first marriage ended shortly after his daughter’s birth in 1955, and his dating habits in the years between then and his 1973 marriage to Guyanan beauty queen Shakira Baksh earned him a reputation as a womanizer. Hall also describes Caine’s working relationships with such stars as Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Olivier (both good), and his relocation to L.A. in the 1970s to avoid paying high British taxes. Homesick, he came back in 1987, but he irritated some fans by complaining about the British class system. In a speech in the late 1990s, he observed, “I had an awkward voice and a duff accent when people were writing plays about chaps coming through French windows in cricket jumpers.”
A serviceable reference for fans and moviegoers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-904034-82-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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