An overlong but insightful account of an extraordinarily gifted entertainer who has never quite found his proper niche. Actor, comedian, musician, composer—at age 62, Moore is one of the most protean talents in showbiz today. Yet despite the occasional signal successes, such as the films 10 and Arthur, he has seemingly never tapped his full potential, at least in his own eyes: ``You could say I'm a Jack of all trades, master of none. I guess the incentive isn't there and I feel it's too late to do anything.'' From childhood, he was openly ambitious for fame and for the approval and adoration that usually go with it. As his longtime comic partner and occasional friend Peter Cook once acidly joked: ``If I'd been a club-footed dwarf from Dagenham, then I'd be that ambitious too.'' Moore's club foot (and his short stature) loom large as Rosebud for Paskin, explaining everything from the actor's comedy to his ceaseless womanizing. Through his considerable musical talents, Moore was able to surmount both his handicap and his working-class background, winning a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied classical music but lived for jazz. On graduation he was cast in the groundbreaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. From there it was on to Hollywood, some successes, some flops, four wives, and relative fame and fortune. Paskin, the BBC's Hollywood correspondent, has had extraordinary access to all aspects of Moore's life, including his diaries and even his psychiatrists. This allows her to create a fully realized portrait but does make her account seem, at times, too official and adoring. She also tends to tell rather than show, for example, prating on at length about how funny Moore is, but she includes less than a dozen examples of his humor. Like Moore's career, this biography promises much but never quite delivers. (65 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-283-06264-9
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Sidgwick & Jackson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
