A well-meaning but flawed book about legendary filmmakers.
A prolific film critic offers analyses of noteworthy directors.
Despite the subtitle, Thomson presents a series of personal assessments of a handful of filmmakers. “I have omitted so many people,” he admits. Indeed, there are chapters on Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles but not Sergei Eisenstein, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, and many others. Much of this material appears in greater detail in other, better books, including some of Thomson’s own works. A typically florid sentence is the author’s appraisal of Hitchcock: “A time may come when he stands for Movies in the way Attila the Hun bestrides the Dark Ages or Cleopatra signifies Ancient Egypt.” Thomson’s opinions are often based on debatable logic. He notes with sadness that Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game has fallen behind Vertigo in greatest-films surveys, but even readers who agree that Vertigo is the lesser film might be baffled by the author’s claim that its triumph over Renoir’s indictment of maladjusted sophisticates represents “opting for neurosis over reason.” Curiously for such an acclaimed film critic, Thomson gets facts wrong. For example, he claims The Piano wasn’t nominated for Best Picture the year Driving Miss Daisy won. The Piano came out four years after Daisy, and it was nominated but lost to Schindler’s List. While the author makes some progressive statements—e.g., that the film industry needs more respect for women—he undercuts them with tin-eared comments, such as when noting the camera’s infatuation with Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour: “I have a similar wish to dwell on the smoothness of Deneuve’s skin.” Only one chapter focuses on women directors. But at least the book has some memorable lines: “There are instants in Pierrot le Fou where its grasp of love and love’s death are like hummingbirds on your veranda, while Doctor Zhivago is a pantechnicon struggling up a distant hill with a grand piano to be carried up the stairs.”
A well-meaning but flawed book about legendary filmmakers.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31815-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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