Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.
Celebrity biographer Russell (Arise Sir Tom Jones, 2007, etc.) chooses as her latest subject the phenomenally popular soccer star.
Beckham isn’t merely a very skilled athlete, she suggests, but an icon deserving a knighthood. This is a difficult claim to make since he doesn’t come across as unusually culturally or socially active. In chronological fashion, Russell recounts Beckham’s already well-known history: childhood soccer prodigy, Manchester United star, romance with wife Victoria (aka Posh Spice), move to Real Madrid and finally a quarter-billion-dollar contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Along the way, the author works hard to demonstrate that Beckham is deeper than the average celebrity. She points out that, although he works in the hyper-macho world of competitive sports, he enjoys fashion and accepts his status as a sex symbol to gay men. (While unusual among athletes, this isn’t quite on par with Dennis Rodman wearing drag or Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs.) Russell’s effort to paint Beckham as beyond mere celebrity superficialities, however, is undercut by the fact that she goes out of her way to attach a dollar value to just about everything he gets or owns, from salary and cars to homes and jewelry. The biography reads like little more than a puff piece gleaned from dozens of tabloid clippings. It chronicles events familiar to any Beckham fan, including his turbulent relationship with Manchester’s old-school manager, Alex Ferguson, the births of his children and the rumors of infidelity that rocked the perception of Beckham as, in Russell’s hyperbolic words, “the world’s best husband and father.”
Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84454-416-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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