Indispensable additions to any American film library.
The stars shine bright in this series of brief biographies of four of classic Hollywood’s most enduring icons.
Eminent film critic Thomson (The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, 2009, etc.) brings a historian’s acumen and poet’s sensibility to his portraits of Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman (ISBN: 978-0-86547-934-0), Humphrey Bogart (ISBN: 978-0-86547-933-3) and Gary Cooper (ISBN: 978-0-86547-932-6). The author seeks to identify the mythic essence of each of the star’s cinematic personae, and the ways in which key films and carefully managed public perceptions shaped those ideas. Davis enjoyed a long reign as Hollywood’s top star in the era of great stars, despite and because of her variable looks, peppery temperament and air of starchy New England superiority. Bergman was the “natural” country girl, beautiful and virtuous, whose selfish passion for her career and compulsive promiscuity both fueled the love fantasies of her audience and ultimately led to international scandal and disgrace. Bogart, the sensitive tough guy, was hounded by insecurity and a host of other personal demons, his upper-class background lending an innate dignity and honor to his fabled menagerie of wisecracking gangsters and gumshoes. Cooper is presented as a hapless, weak-willed adulterer whose lean body, rugged handsomeness and preternatural stillness translated on camera as a quintessentially American rectitude and heroic stoicism. In clean, allusive prose, Thomson assesses the filmographies of these titans, offering surprising judgments and insights—he despises Cooper’s beloved Sergeant York (1941) and the Davis classic The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)—and defining the magic of a vanished kind of stardom, an orchestrated mystique that made these men and women dream figures for a mass audience. The books are full of fascinating tidbits of gossip regarding his subjects’ sexual peccadilloes, financial maneuverings and studio politicking, and Thomson is wickedly funny and startlingly poetic in his observations. On Davis: “Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful.”
Indispensable additions to any American film library.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-931-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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