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DANIEL DAY-LEWIS

Name: DANIEL DAY-LEWIS
Author: Garry Jenkins
ISBN: 0-312-13044-9

THE FIRE WITHIN

by Garry Jenkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1995

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British journalist Jenkins adds to the mystery of the elusive actor in this respectful, not very gossipy, unauthorized biography. Though not yet 40, and though he's been featured in only ten or so films, Daniel Day-Lewis has already established himself as a star of amazing depth and range. Jenkins relies largely on interviews with Day-Lewis's half-brother, his nanny, and his teachers, as well as the few previously published interviews with the striking-looking but demure Englishman. Day-Lewis boasts quite a fancy pedigree. His father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was the poet laureate, a translator, and a mystery novelist (as Nicholas Blake); his mother, Cecil's second wife, Jill, is the daughter of Sir Michael Balcon, the head of production at Ealing Studios during the heyday of British filmmaking. Jill is also an actor of note, though she abandoned her career to raise her two children. A comfortable childhood was darkened only by Daniel's father's death when the boy was 15. Daniel's tendency to befriend lower-class toughs and mimic their ways led to his first bit role as a hooligan in Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He studied Method acting at Bristol Old Vic, where he began preparing for roles with grueling immersion into character, and made a name for himself onstage. But but it wasn't until 1985 that Day-Lewis made a splash with his widely disparate portrayals of a gay London punk in My Beautiful Laundrette and the upper-class prig in A Room with a View. His shape-shifting has persisted with roles as a Czech Don Juan, an early American frontiersman, an Irish political prisoner, and the crippled writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot, for which he won the 1989 Best Actor Oscar. Jenkins inflates his prose at times, and indulges in not a few show-biz clichÇs. But it's a serviceable job nonetheless, a fine tribute to a talent in full bloom.

Pub Date: July 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-312-13044-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WIZARD OF SUN CITY
by Garry Jenkins

- BOOK REVIEW
COLONEL CODY AND THE FLYING CATHEDRAL
by Garry Jenkins

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IN THE SHADOW OF ISLAM

by Isabelle Eberhardt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 1994

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A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994

ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9

Page Count: 120

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NO MAN'S LAND

THE PLACE OF THE WOMAN WRITER IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, VOL. III: LETTERS FROM THE FRONT

by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 21, 1994

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The final third of this feminist literary study maintains the quality of volumes I (The War of the Words, 1987) and II (Sexchanges, 1989) as it looks at women writers' exploration of our century's complex and ever-shifting cultural scene, particularly the thorny question of gender. Gilbert and Gubar take a generally chronological approach, beginning with the modernists. In their analysis, Virginia Woolf sketched scenarios challenging traditional sex roles, as well as the historical settings and the social hierarchies in which they functioned. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore were ``female female impersonators'' who exploited femininity's artificiality in an imaginative but uncertainly empowering way. The authors then move on to the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that such writers as Nora Zeale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Faucet, and Nella Larsen worked to reveal the ``authentic (black) feminine'' behind racial stereotypes and criticized (white) feminism. Intertwining the poet and her work, a chapter on HD maintains that she produced her long poems by consciously manipulating images of herself. Moving forward to WW II, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the period's ``blitz on women'': Cheesecake pinups on tanks and VD posters conflated sex and death, while even positive images of the women left behind were tinged with resentment. They contend that metaphors from the war, transformed into images of sexual battle, haunted the poems of Sylvia Plath, who fought toward a way of being a woman beyond the old patriarchal traditions. At once playful and thoughtful, the final chapter considers the multiplicity of women's stories via the authors' several rewrites of Snow White—e.g., the no-longer-evil queen challenges gender roles by advising Snow White to ``marry the Prince but sleep with me too,'' while in another version a critically savvy queen realizes they're all ``merely signifiers, signifying nothing.'' A satisfying conclusion to an ambitious project.