Strong, tender, and revealing.
An actor’s life, as told in flashback.
Gene Wilder is familiar to the American public as the mad scientist in Young Frankenstein and the kooky Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Not so familiar is Jerry Silberman: that is, Gene Wilder himself in his pre-acting days. This “autobiography” is really more about Silberman than Wilder, who uses a rather unusual device to tell Jerry’s story: his visits to psychiatrist Margie Waller become a filter for his memories of life as Jerry Silberman. The young Jerry is an introspective boy with a gift for comedy who can make his mother laugh—she has a heart condition, and Jerry tries to relieve any stress that might aggravate it. His early reminiscences seem focused equally on acting and on encounters with the opposite sex, although there’s a bizarre little ramble about his compulsion to pray, which is humorous in a pathos-filled way. The acting memories make sense—Wilder entertainingly relates how his earl acting experiences formed a foundation for his successful acting career. Surprisingly enough, his tales of sexual liaisons with young women are not played for broad humor but are told in a rather matter-of-fact, straightforward style, with tiny nuggets of humor buried deep. These opening pages set the tone for the rest, where the focus remains on acting and relationships, all told in the same matter-of-fact style, with subtle snippets of humor sprinkled throughout. It’s not an autobiography in the usual sense of the word, but it does give the reader an understanding of Jerry Silberman’s deliberate transformation into Gene Wilder. Wilder is quite candid about his life, not flinching at all when it comes to sharing intimate details. Especially poignant is the section on his romance with Gilda Radner, the comic actress who became his wife and was to die of cancer (It’s Always Something, 1989). Wilder evidently wrote the book himself, and did well; it’s an honest, affecting look at his life.
Strong, tender, and revealing.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33706-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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