An amiable if unsurprising daily diary (covering all of 1995 and half of 1996) from the great British thespian. Now in his 80s and almost completely retired from stage and screen, Guinness (Blessings in Disguise, 1986) seems content to go gently into that good night. His days are pleasantly routine; he reads the morning papers, feeds the fish in his pond, walks with his dogs, and enjoys the occasional jaunt into London. After the cocktail hour and a hearty supper, he curls up with a good book or a BBC documentary on the telly. Occasionally he takes a flutter on the national lottery, hoping to hit it big and go on an art-buying spree. But the greatest excitement is provided by brief holidays on the continent. It's all very, very British, and undemanding anglophiles will find much to revel in here. On the evidence of the diary, it's clear that Guinness would make an admirable, extremely genial dinner guest, charming, intellectually curious, with a nice supply of mildly amusing anecdotes. But the general effect here is as comfortably worn as an old pair of slippers. Age is the great enemy of actors—it destroys the crucial ability to remember their lines, reducing them to smaller and smaller roles. This, and diminished energies, are why Guinness now rejects almost all the offers that come his way. Whether it's British phlegm or stoicism or both, he calmly suffers the many insults and indignities of his aging body—his blind eye, his diminished hearing, etc. In contrast to the memoirs of many American actors, there is little egocentrism and a great deal of intelligence and aesthetic sensitivity here, as well as a keenly literate style. Guinness truly enjoys good books, music, and art, and he remains an active playgoer. His diary may not make for gripping material, but it does seem to suggest an ideal way to spend one's retirement.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-87589-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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