A colorful though repetitious memoir of life in a small Lebanese village just after the Second World War. Accawi’s first book is a lament for the lost world of his youth—for the sights, smells, sounds, and rituals of Magdaluna (“the tower of the moon”), a tiny village that now exists only in memory. To connect these reminiscences, Accawi compares himself, for reasons that are not immediately clear, to a pyramid builder, whose “stones” are the ideas, events, people, pets, and, most curiously, the small appliances which have shaped his life. The Magdalunians emerge here as an entertaining if feckless bunch who tend their goat herds and olive groves, marry their cousins, and generally live their lives with little contact with the outside world. When the modern world begins to intrude, traditions that have lasted for centuries—everything from baking bread to gathering at the village spring to dancing the Dabki—quickly disappear. Accawi’s stories, told from a child’s perspective, are peopled with memorable characters such as Teta, his one-eyed Presbyterian grandmother, and Abu George, the virile village blacksmith who stands on his roof and bellows the latest news in a voice that can be heard for miles around. Yet this is a book in which small appliances loom very large. The author devotes entire chapters to the coming of the radio, the gramophone, and the telephone, among others, blaming each in its turn for the village’s downfall, before melodramatically pointing his finger at the automobile, specifically “a shiny black DeSoto standing like a dark, massive monument upon what looks to me like the tomb of the world.” Strangely, the fact that Magdaluna was actually leveled by Muslim fighters during the Lebanese civil war is mentioned almost as an afterthought. Taken individually, these stories can transport the reader to another world (—The Telephone” was included in The Best American Essays 1998). Taken together, they sound so much alike that the exotic finally becomes mundane.
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-8070-7008-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.
The debut memoir from the pop and fashion star.
Early on, Simpson describes the book she didn’t write: “a motivational manual telling you how to live your best life.” Though having committed to the lucrative deal years before, she “walked away,” fearing any sort of self-help advice she might give would be hypocritical. Outwardly, Simpson was at the peak of her success, with her fashion line generating “one billion dollars in annual sales.” However, anxiety was getting the better of her, and she admits she’d become a “feelings addict,” just needing “enough noise to distract me from the pain I’d been avoiding since childhood. The demons of traumatic abuse that refused to let me sleep at night—Tylenol PM at age twelve, red wine and Ambien as a grown, scared woman. Those same demons who perched on my shoulder, and when they saw a man as dark as them, leaned in to my ear to whisper, ‘Just give him your light. See if it saves him…’ ” On Halloween 2017, Simpson hit rock bottom, and, with the intervention of her devoted friends and husband, began to address her addictions and underlying fears. In this readable but overlong narrative, the author traces her childhood as a Baptist preacher’s daughter moving 18 times before she “hit fifth grade,” and follows her remarkable rise to fame as a singer. She reveals the psychological trauma resulting from years of sexual abuse by a family friend, experiences that drew her repeatedly into bad relationships with men, most publicly with ex-husband Nick Lachey. Admitting that she was attracted to the validating power of an audience, Simpson analyzes how her failings and triumphs have enabled her to take control of her life, even as she was hounded by the press and various music and movie executives about her weight. Simpson’s memoir contains plenty of personal and professional moments for fans to savor. One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
An eye-opening glimpse into the attempted self-unmaking of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable talents.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289996-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A witty trip through a unique life in the theater.
Reminiscences by one of the pioneers of American avant-garde theater.
Few artists’ lives have been as colorful as that of Gregory. Born in Paris in 1934 to Russian Jewish parents, he lived a privileged life of “private clubs, private schools, debutante balls” once the family left wartime Europe for New York. They spent summers in a California house Thomas Mann rented to them, where they socialized with celebrities like Errol Flynn, with whom his mother had an affair. He discovered a passion for acting when he attended a New York private school “established to train repressed, polite, withdrawn little WASPs.” Much of this book, co-written by London (An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, 2013, etc.), is a series of vignettes, some more entertaining than others, about Gregory’s artistic and spiritual journey: stage manager jobs at regional theaters, lessons at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, pilgrimages to ashrams in India, and outrageous flourishes in the plays he directed, such as a production of Max Frisch’s Firebugs that featured an actual fire engine onstage and scenes from Hiroshima projected onto a trampoline—a gig that got him fired. The narrative is filled with anecdotes about such luminaries as fellow director Jerzy Grotowski, who had a profound influence on Gregory’s work, and Gregory Peck, who “slugged” him during an argument during the filming of Tartuffe. The highlight for many readers will likely be details of his long collaboration—“forty-five years and only one fight”—with Wallace Shawn and the making of their art-house hit My Dinner With André. These sections chronicle the duo’s struggles to make the picture, from Gregory’s memorizing hundreds of pages of dialogue for “the longest speaking role in the history of film” to his wearing long johns during the shoot because they couldn’t afford to heat the hotel where the restaurant scenes were staged.
A witty trip through a unique life in the theater.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-29854-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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