Light entertainment from a witty woman.
A breezy little volume by an actress facing old age with aplomb.
Now in her late 60s, Keaton, an Academy Award winner in 1977 for her role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, sprinkles memories of her long career, including her friendships and more with certain leading men, into a mishmash of thoughts about childhood, beauty and parenting. The author’s attitude toward her own physical flaws—drooping eyes, a less-than-perfect nose, thinning hair—is meant to be reassuring to self-critical female readers. There is a rationale behind the omnipresent hats, tinted glasses and turtlenecks that other women might consider, but Keaton’s message is that everyone should do their own thing. Never married, she is raising two adopted children, now teenagers, who figure prominently in the narrative. Even movie stars, it seems, have ordinary parenting problems and bad days. Woven into the domestic scenes are recollections of film roles and fellow actors. Readers looking for chitchat about celebrities will be gratified; Keaton drops plenty of names, although at times, they seem to be somewhat forcefully injected into her narrative. The author is generous in her comments about others, giving full credit to her longtime friend Allen for launching her career and speaking well of the leading men in her life. For the record, Keaton reports that Warren Beatty, her co-star in Reds, had a pretty face, but Al Pacino, with whom she acted in the Godfather films, had a beautiful one. There are no illustrations; however, Keaton’s eye for detail makes them unnecessary. One caveat: The text is exceedingly brief, an afternoon’s read at best. The type is heavily leaded to fill out the pages, giving the impression that there’s more than is being delivered.
Light entertainment from a witty woman.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9426-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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