More reverential than critical.
Fawning biography of playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote (1916–2009).
New York Times theater critic Hampton does little to restrain his admiration as he follows Foote from his birth in small-town Wharton, Texas, to his installation in the playwrights’ pantheon. By the end of his career, Foote earned two Oscars, a Pulitzer, an Emmy and a Tony nomination. Hampton describes Foote’s struggles to make it as an actor, his decision to focus on writing rather than performing (with occasional directing stints), his scripts produced during the “golden age” of 1950s television, his big breaks (especially the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird), his debates with executives in Hollywood (who failed to adequately promote Tender Mercies, even after its Oscar wins), his temporary disappearance in the ’70s (and consequent financial difficulties), his reemergence in the ’90s and his grand end-of-career conception (the nine-play Orphans’ Home Cycle). The author charts Foote’s long and usually happy marriage and keeps track of his children and their myriad failures and successes—most notably, his daughter Hallie, who performed well, Hampton says, in several of her father’s productions. The author occasionally pauses to summarize the plots of Foote’s works and to review what critics thought of them. Here, as elsewhere, Hampton seldom quotes discouraging words but frequently quotes at length any encomiums, most prominently those of Times colleague Frank Rich. Scholars and other curious readers will find this work frustrating. The author cites few sources and includes no notes, and he reproduces, without attribution, verbatim conversations from Foote’s memoirs. In response to a pivotal question—why Foote is often overlooked in comparison to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller—Hampton offers a fairly feeble answer: He was too nice a guy.
More reverential than critical.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6640-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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