A sprightly memoir by a pioneering female screenwriter. Born in 1900 to Russian radicals who had immigrated to New York City, Frederica Sagor answered an ad for story editor at Universal and by her mid-20s had written several hit films, including The Plastic Age and The Waning Sex. By the time she left the business in 1950, she and her husband, writer-producer Ernest Maas, had worked on dozens of movies with major directors and stars. Charlie Chaplin sat at her commissary table; John Ford cut out of a party early with her; Joan Crawford was a hick named Lucille LeSueur who entreated the well-clad writer to take her shopping and dress her like a star. The breezy text is chockablock with colloquialisms, and slang fans will especially appreciate Maas’s descriptions of women: girls with plenty of “ginger,” or great “gams,” or who, like the author herself, “learned about the good old pessary and so felt free to play the field.” In his foreword, film historian Kevin Brownlow rightly places the book in the context of film history. But Maas does not write with Film History in mind; she tells of how she made her living in a tough profession and enjoyed a lasting marriage. Brownlow says that the book will make readers “angry,” and some injustices do raise ire, such as MGM stealing the couple’s idea for an in-theater promotion or 20th-Century Fox gaudily transforming their upright story, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, into the Betty Grable vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. But for the most part, the blackballing, debauchery, and mogul mendacity described sound just like Hollywood today. The names may have changed, the films may have acquired sound, but the small-minded boss is eternal. Not a literary masterpiece, but more important proof of women’s participation—if not recognition—behind the scenes in early Hollywood. A filmography would have been welcome. (30 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2122-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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