A comprehensive biography that ultimately seems rather like a 400-page Cole Porter song list. McBrien (English/Hofstra Univ.; coauthor, with Jack V. Barbera, of Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith, not reviewed) enjoyed the cooperation of the Porter estate and the composer’s relatives; he interviewed surviving friends and colleagues; and he makes extensive use of contemporary periodicals and previous books about Porter. He duly collects the pertinent information and imparts it clearly, from Porter’s 1891 birth into a wealthy Indiana family to his lonely death in 1964 after 27 years of suffering from leg injuries sustained during a riding accident. McBrien conscientiously chronicles Porter’s privileged existence: undergraduate cavorting at Yale; early composing efforts; marriage to an equally affluent widow; his travels through Europe during the 1920s (when he was considered too rich to really devote himself to Broadway); and then his triumph, from the 1930s through the 1950s, as the musical theater’s smartest, sexiest, most sophisticated songwriter. This detailed narrative is long on facts and quotes but short on analysis. Attempting to understand, for example, how the Porters sustained mutual affection even as the homosexual Cole pursued men with increasing openness, McBrien settles for a friend’s reductive explanation that Linda’s unhappy first marriage had put her off sex. It’s a pleasure to read large chunks of brilliant lyrics from Porter’s astonishing array of classic songs (“Anything Goes,” “Love for Sale,” “Night and Day,” “You’re the Top,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”), but McBrien unfortunately devotes much less time to the sinuous melodies and pulsating rhythms that were equally important. His account of Porter’s decline and death acknowledges but doesn’t do justice to decades of pain borne with stoicism and style. McBrien obviously appreciates and loves his subject, but his book lacks two things needed to convey Porter’s essence: wit and rue. (72 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-394-58235-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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