Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be...
The renowned actor and Trump bugaboo opines about filmmaking, politics, and sundry other matters in this cheerful but not entirely amiable memoir.
Baldwin grew up amid difficult circumstances: a houseful of squalling siblings, parents without resources, fraught conditions—but all of it gave him a certain freedom, since, as he writes, “my father had no money to buy things, and thus no power to manipulate us by withholding those same things.” That freedom, plus a bookish and artistic bent, led him to acting, an art that he describes as scarcely understood to outsiders and particularly to the executives in charge of film studios—which helps explain why Baldwin’s favorite venue is the stage. A generally nice but not cuddly guy in these pages, the author emerges as a careful student of film and film history, and his observations on the craft will be of particular interest to would-be actors; his reading of Steve McQueen and his minimalist acting (“Steve McQueen taught me that sometimes the trick is to do nothing at all”) alone is worth the price of admission. Baldwin can be sharp-tongued, as when he writes of one director, the daughter of David Lynch, that she “had apparently inherited his unruly hairstyle but none of his talent.” With no apparent desire to please or explain away, Baldwin also addresses head-on some of the thornier points on his resume, including the infamous voicemail he left for his young daughter and a spectacularly ugly tabloid divorce. He has much to say on current events as well, and though he is cagey on the question of running for office, he sounds a nice note for the hustings by remarking toward the end, “it is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country with those who built it.”
Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be placated—but that, Baldwin notes, is for another book.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240970-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2017
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
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