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Mailer on Mailer |
List Price: $24.98
Your Price: $22.48 |
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
After a long career of writing books and courting controversy, Norman Mailer leans into the lens of a video camera and briefly explains how he doesn't like appearing on TV. But he's got ideas to express, and so here he is, giving us Mailer on Mailer, an installment of the PBS series American Masters. Seated at a table at his seaside retreat, with the Atlantic visible in the background, Mailer speaks directly to the camera and recounts major events of his life. This oral autobiography is punctuated with trenchant comments on what it has meant to be a writer in modern America. His reminiscences of serving in the South Pacific are presented, along with excerpts from letters he wrote home and passages from The Naked and the Dead, the novel that catapulted him to national prominence in 1948. Moving forward through the decades, vintage news clips, including some of the noted author himself in one fracas or another, are shown as Mailer talks about how profound changes in the country affected his other books. His running commentary is intelligent and frequently humorous, and he occasionally levels some scathing criticism at his own behavior over the years. At one point he cracks his trademark pugnacious grin and asks, "What's the use of being a writer if you can't irritate a great many people?" In this production, Mailer, never known to be boring, provides an entertaining and intelligent look into his own thinking and his admitted love-hate relationship with America. --Robert J. McNamara
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