Written by a family member, the book lacks objectivity and suffers from an excess of detail about family lineage.
A fawning biography of the British aristocrat who, with Howard Carter, unearthed King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
The author is the wife of the eighth Earl of Carnarvon as well as the caretaker of the vast family castle, Highclere, now famous as the locus of the TV show Downton Abbey. The fifth Earl of Carnarvon, George Herbert (1866-1923), was the most notorious of the bunch, as the financial backer of Carter’s King Tut excavation in 1922 and a dilettantish archaeologist who perished shortly after the momentous discovery from blood poisoning. The countess delineates with painstaking detail the privileged fabric of the scion’s life. He was known as Porchey as a child, the only son of a well-regarded Tory statesman. Porchey was sickly growing up and stricken by the early death of his mother in 1875, when he was 8. He was raised to love hunting and horse racing, and he was more interested in socializing and gambling than academics while a student at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1895, he married Almina Wombwell, the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, and he spent untold amounts of money on racehorses and cutting-edge automobiles before discovering his love of Egyptology. He and Almina spent much of each winter season in Egypt, and in 1908, he employed Carter as his “learned man” to extend excavation work into the Valley of Deir el-Bahri. With the war intervening and political upheaval in Egypt, the two got back to the Valley of the Kings by 1920. Due to his health, however, the earl could not savor the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, but his widow persevered with Carter, ensuring his tireless work would not be in vain. The narrative may interest amateur Egyptologists, but the text is another addition to a long line of the author’s celebrations of her wealthy, influential descendants—e.g., The Women of the Real Downton Abbey, At Home at Highclere, etc.
Written by a family member, the book lacks objectivity and suffers from an excess of detail about family lineage.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-326422-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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