The intimate and semi-entertaining details of an actor’s childhood and her rise to stardom in Hollywood.
The autobiography of a Mainer who hit the big time in Hollywood.
Born and raised in Portland, Maine, Kendrick started acting professionally at a very young age when she landed a part in a community theater production of Annie. From there, she scored other parts in a variety of plays and eventually wound up in Hollywood, where she's had roles in the Twilight and Pitch Perfect series and Up in the Air, among other movies. "My entire personality was fully formed by the time I was three,” writes the author. “I was an obstinate, determined little ball of anxiety. I’d thought of myself as fearful and shrinking in childhood but I was often single-minded and pugnacious. From age three onward I have been practical and skeptical and occasionally more courageous than I have any right to be." Kendrick blends her discussion of how she entered into the acting business with commentary on events in her childhood, most of which are typical. She covers her small stature, her friends and enemies in grade school, her crushes on a number of boys, how she learned about fashion and stylists in Hollywood, what it was like to work with famous actors like George Clooney, and a host of other, often mundane details of her life. Because she was a child actor, most of Kendrick’s stories are focused on her early, formative years when she had to balance work and trying to live a somewhat normal childhood. Unfortunately, her attempts at humor often fall flat, making her sound unnecessarily snarky instead of funny, and her overall tone borders on self-obsessed. Fans of Kendrick and those infatuated with knowing the personal details of a celebrity's life will enjoy finding out how the author rose to stardom; others may find the content less than entertaining. Thanks to her hard work, Kendrick is a scrappy little somebody now, but she should stick to acting.
The intimate and semi-entertaining details of an actor’s childhood and her rise to stardom in Hollywood.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1720-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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