An extended valentine to an actress we've all fallen in love with at least once. While many actors fail to live up to their publicity, Audrey Hepburn seems, by all accounts, to have been as genuinely charming, and stylish, and wistful, and kindhearted as she appears on-screen. Of course, life wasn't always kind. There were two divorces, miscarriages, professional disappointments, and unsettled memories from her childhood in wartime Holland. But mostly, she enjoyed herself well enough, playing mother to her children and a succession of adored dogs, tending her own garden in her Swiss retreat, and doing good-will work for UNICEF. Movies were all right as far as they went, and though she made a few classics such as Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany's, she had no overwhelming passion for them (like Garbo, she made only 26 films). Despite winning an Oscar for Roman Holiday, she was not a particularly gifted actress, best suited, like John Wayne, to playing versions of herself. But she had presence and style, and with the able assistance of the designer Givenchy, defined fashion for almost a generation. Whether this all adds up to an interesting biography is another question. Hepburn herself once declared, ``There's never been a helluva lot to say about me.'' Veteran Hollywood biographer Paris (Garbo, 1995, etc.) does his unlevel best to prove her wrong, but he is only partly successful. He is too much the fan, too much in awe of ``Audrey.'' Paris rarely goes even as deep as an attempt to capture the evanescence of a screen persona, preferring instead the appointment-book surety of times and places and people. Still, all the facts are in the proper places, pleasantly displayed, and easily accessible, and that's more than can be said for most show-biz bios. (b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14056-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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