FRIDAY: My Book World | Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
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FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
My Book World Schumacher, Michael. Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker’s Life. New York: Crown, 1999.
If readers are fans of both film and director Coppola, this book is an embarrassment of riches—at least as far as it takes us, through 1998 when the book comes out. One may not realize, for example, how easy the 1970s seem for Coppola, succeeding beyond his wildest dreams with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The next twenty years are more arduous, and Coppola loses his credibility at times. He wishes to be more of an artiste, making films that appeal to him but perhaps not the public at large—or the studios. Even when he makes a big-budget, mass-appeal film, he is almost always at loggerheads with studio execs over scripts and, of course, money. He is a creative man, who also finances, for a time, his own studio, and even publishes a literary magazine, Zoetrope: All Story, which still exists today—not to mention a number of other enterprises including a winery. He ends the nineties having made enough money to dig himself out of debt and establish an independent life. Although he continues to make film, it is at his own pleasure. One has to admire that. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Herman Wouk's Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
FRIDAY: My Book World | Mikita Brottman's Couple Found Slain
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hershel Parker's Herman Melville
FRIDAY: My Book World | Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone
TOMORROW: My Book World | Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of John Cheever
FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
My Book World Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.
This book of exhaustive research concerning Wilde’s life is a pleasure to read from his family history to his imprisonment years later and his resulting exile in France. Prior to reading this book, I had always had the impression that Oscar Wilde’s life (except for prison) was one wild ride (pardon the pun). And in some ways it was. He, even after experiencing financial success, was always in want of money, primarily because he was such a spendthrift, spending or giving away money he honestly didn’t have. He cared not about what people thought of his extravagant ideas, his extravagant living. Yet Wilde faced great public disapproval of how he lived his life. His only friends were other homosexual men or those liberal enough to accept him. His downfall came in the package of one man, Lord Alfred Douglas, a much younger man, an aristocrat who both loved and used Wilde. If Wilde had never met him, he might have met his match with some other party, but I doubt it. The latter part of Wilde’s sad life was battling Douglas’s father in court. Lord Percy Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, managed to have Wilde sent to prison for two years because he didn’t want Wilde near his son. Wilde did his prison time, and it broke him, both physically and emotionally. He never wrote anything substantial again, was always begging others for money, and suffered physical ailments that eventually brought on his premature death at forty-six. Ellmann’s distinguished book, more than thirty years old now, does great justice to the life of an extraordinary writer who lived, until he could no longer bear the speed of light, entirely ahead of his time. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies
FRIDAY: My Book World | Matt Bell's novel Appleseed
FRIDAY: My Book World | Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-40 Idaho
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
January 2022
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