Executed with the conviction and meticulousness of a Preminger production.
Richly embroidered biography of the legendary stage and film director with an incendiary temper and uneven legacy.
Preminger (1905–1983) could not have asked for a more assiduous or generous biographer than Hirsch (Film/Brooklyn College; Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway, 2002, etc.), who has visited the archives, studied the films, interviewed the principals, walked the ground and read all relevant documents. The result will endure as the definitive life of one of film’s most intriguing and volcanic personalities. Born in Poland to a German-speaking Jewish family, Preminger spent his childhood in Austria, where he soon became obsessed with the theater. Gifted with an extraordinary memory, a ferocious work ethic and a vaulting ambition, the young man quickly established himself as an actor. When premature baldness ended his career as a leading man, he moved into character parts, often playing Nazis, then into the director’s chair. He arrived in New York in 1935 to direct a production on Broadway and by 1936 was making films for Darryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox. Later he became an independent producer and director. Hirsch devotes sufficient space to Preminger’s personal life, but his principal interest is in his subject’s evolution—and eventual disintegration—as a filmmaker. The author describes the mounting of each production, with wrenching accounts of Preminger’s fiery clashes with performers ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Paula Prentiss, Faye Dunaway and Dyan Cannon. He also unblinkingly records Preminger’s bullying of Tom Tryon and Jean Seberg, among others. But Hirsch credits the director for such fine films as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder and the underrated Advise & Consent. He praises Preminger, too, for dealing with difficult subjects and for breaking the blacklist by giving Dalton Trumbo, who refused to testify before the 1947 HUAC, a screen credit.
Executed with the conviction and meticulousness of a Preminger production.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-41373-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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