Solid reporting on a significant body of work. (40 photos)
An objective take on the life and works of a groundbreaking, controversial filmmaker. Despite the misleading author credit, this is not an autobiography.
Rather, the work is a biography by Pakistani-British filmmaker and critic Aftab, writing here with the permission of his subject, who comments at length on virtually every issue the book covers. Aftab occasionally verges on fan-magazine style (“[Lee’s] wedding signaled a new Spike Lee”), but mostly he offers an even-handed portrait in which Lee comes across as talented and innovative, yet also arrogant and hyper-sensitive to criticism. Aftab’s most significant thread is that Lee’s creation of a production company, Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks, opened up opportunities for black filmmakers and, in its films, presented realistic, trenchant accounts of black characters and the issues they face. Aftab’s accounts of Lee at work, directing Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, She’s Gotta Have It, etc., offer a wealth of details about the man’s methods. Quotes from actors, photographers, writers and producers flesh out the accounts, forming a valuable record of Lee’s achievements. Most importantly, Aftab doesn’t shy from exploring the prickly issues Lee and his films raise: Is Lee himself racist when he insists, as he did when making Malcolm X, that “white directors can’t get it right” when they depict the lives of black characters? Are the depictions of gays and lesbians in Lee’s films homophobic and the images of women sexist? Are Lee’s films inspired, but technically crude, as some critics suggest? Aftab quotes primary sources who come down on all sides of these issues. The clashing views leave the reader somewhat adrift—Aftab shies from drawing more general conclusions about Lee and his films.
Solid reporting on a significant body of work. (40 photos)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-06153-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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