Like the quilt her character Celie makes in the bestselling novel The Color Purple, Walker has created a patchwork verbal memento of the filming of her novel that will delight fans and movie buffs but is too self-absorbed to be of general interest. Hesitating both to record a personally painful time in her life and to try to answer those critics—especially blacks—who accused her of hating black men, Walker explains that she was finally able to write this book by freeing herself of the past, by "growing a new skin." And as she began assembling journal entries, letters from fans and critics, media commentary, and her own script—published here for the first time—she noticed how the experience of those years had changed her own understanding: "You really cannot step into the same river twice." She now understood why Steven Spielberg, the director, as a creative person, had not always been true to the book: For instance, in the movie, Celie was no longer a writer. Involved in the actual making of the movie, Walker fervently praises the stars, the script writer, and Spielberg, but what hurt her was black reaction to the film. She includes both positive and negative critiques as well as letters from admirers and opponents to indicate the range of emotions it provoked. Though the movie was nominated for but won no awards, Walker feels that the strengths The Color Purple celebrates will endure. Walker details here not only how the movie came to be made, but her own sufferings in that period: a debilitating bout of Lyme disease; the prolonged death of her mother; and the end of a long relationship. These travails she now sees as a series of "spiritual tests" that she needed to overcome before moving forward. More scrapbook than a solid volume, as the usual Walker themes appear only intermittently between clippings and movie memorabilia.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81419-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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