The everywoman superstar is deservedly but incompletely captured in this only partly satisfying biography. Using many sources, including the unpublished memoir of Dressler confidante Claire Dubrey, Toronto Globe reporter Lee presents a panoramic view of Dressler's life. Born Leila Koerber in Cobourg, Ontario, in 1868, Dressler was known at first not for her talent but for her large size and homely face: A neighbor remembered her as ``about the dowdiest looking creature that ever walked our streets.'' Rebellion against a tyrannical father led her to the stage at 14 and revealed a prodigious talent. Years of cross-country road shows, Broadway, and silent-film success followed, but the 1920s brought a career decline. But in the late '20s she lived one of the greatest Hollywood comeback stories, becoming the ``queen of homespun humor'' as a result of affecting performances in such films as Anna Christie, Min and Bill, and Tugboat Annie. By 1932 she had become one of the most popular performers in America. Though Lee details Dressler's career, she fails to convey the actress's powerful hold over the public and offers only a very limited critical appreciation of her distinct talents. Dressler the actress—an earthy, droll, deeply physcial presence—fails to come alive. Lee succeeds better in presenting Dressler's private life, which she views as one built largely on strong allegiances, both personal and political. The star fervently gave herself to causes like actors' rights, the sale of WW I bonds, and women's rights. Equal to her public passions was her need for human commitment, seen in her devotion to the charming, erratic (and married) Jim Dalton, and her control over longtime companion Claire Dubrey. (Lee handles speculation about Dressler's sexual inclinations with inference and concision.) Despite the author's good research and clear affection for Dressler, this lacks the historical and cinematic authority to establish it a standard. It leaves one wanting to know more. (36 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8131-2036-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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