Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.
Well-informed biography of the flamboyant director, utterly lacking the stylishness that made his films so memorable.
The son of touring players, Vincente Minnelli (1903–86) had only the briefest experience of the kind of small-town, Midwestern life he would later enshrine in such popular MGM fare as Meet Me in St. Louis and Father of the Bride. Film scholar Levy (All About Oscar, 2003, etc.) does a commendable job with Minnelli’s early professional years in Chicago and New York, where he dressed department-store windows and designed sets and costumes for movie theaters’ stage shows; he would remain deeply, some said overly, concerned with visual effects in all of his films. Levy also evinces a solid understanding of the essentially somber worldview that made Minnelli as successful with melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful as with such brilliant musicals as An American in Paris and Gigi. He was the quintessential studio director, capable in most genres and able to produce highly personal work within the assembly-line system’s confines. Indeed, first wife Judy Garland complained that he didn’t support her in the battles with MGM that led to her spectacular flameout and the couple’s divorce. The bisexual Minnelli’s stormy union with Garland is the only one of his four marriages that receives much attention here, and only a single male partner is mentioned by name. Aside from a rather catty portrait of his close bond with daughter Liza, the director’s personal life is scanted in favor of his career, which makes sense since he lived for his work. Levy’s judgments about the films are sound; it’s a pity they’re conveyed in dreadful, occasionally incomprehensible prose. This sentence about Father of the Bride is regrettably typical: “Stanley confronts his worst fear of humiliation, here reflected actually a nightmare rather than imagining or dreaming about at.” Such painfully inept presentation undercuts the author’s strong case that Minnelli is the most underrated of Hollywood’s Golden Age craftsmen.
Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-32925-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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