More breathless than breathtaking.
The Italian actress, her supporting cast, and hundreds of extras populate this diffuse biography.
When Eleonora Duse died at age 65 during a US tour in 1924, more than 20,000 adoring fans lined the streets of Manhattan, throwing roses and carnations at the cortege bearing her corpse. What made Duse a legend? Why did her performances literally bring John Barrymore to his knees? Why did acting guru Lee Strasberg proclaim it would take 100 years to comprehend her technique? The answers are scattered through a myriad of detail that Sheehy (Eva Le Gallienne, 1996, etc.) culled from letters, press accounts, and other histories during her prodigious research. But the text never fully conveys the impact of Duse’s acting, perhaps because the author seems to have no overarching theme. Sheehy stints on the theater-shaking confluence of Duse’s talent with Ibsen’s plays, spending far too much time instead with walk-ons in the actress’s biography. (Need one know, for example, that Count Giuseppe Primoli, who appears in passing, was known as “GeGe” to his friends?) The treatment of Duse’s personal life is more evocative, but distasteful: the actress comes across as tiresome, manipulative, and melodramatic. She had a distant relationship with her daughter, who was shipped off to boarding schools so the diva could perform. Duse haughtily refused to talk to most reporters, yet shrewdly cultivated friendships with publishers and writers who might provide favorable coverage or write plays for her. Her remarks often sound like lines from bad plays. At 36, she told a friend, “I’m in the summer . . . and summer is so close to autumn and that is the end.” It’s not surprising to learn that Duse felt her acting brought her closer to reality than did her life, which she regarded as a fiction.
More breathless than breathtaking.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40017-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
