Overly worshipful, but you’d have to be quite jaded to be bored by this chronicle of a miniseries life.
Veteran diva-disher Taraborrelli, who has written about Cher, Madonna and Princess Grace, turns his pen on the silver screen starlet of the century.
Elizabeth Taylor, she of nine lives and eight marriages, was born to privilege in England. She had a stunning, powerful mother intent on making her lovely daughter a Hollywood sensation. In her turbulent life, as Taraborrelli chronicles, Taylor has been (take a deep breath): the horse-loving preteen of National Velvet; the child-bride of volatile heir Nicky Hilton; the tragic young widow of hot-shot director Mike Todd; the home-wrecking vixen of Hollywood’s most wholesome couple, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds; one half of Liz and Dick, twice-married Tinseltown supercouple; political trophy wife and campaign-trail eye-candy; alcoholic pill popper and walking train wreck; AIDS activist and best friend to Michael Jackson; the bloated, bleach-blonde soon-to-be ex-wife of construction worker Larry Fortensky. With all this drama, Taylor’s life is a story that nearly tells itself, and Taraborelli veers from his usual catty criticism. After detailing yet another embarrassing episode or inexcusable deed, the author attempts to make excuses for his subject, consistently starting sentences with the phrase “to be fair.” Where has there ever been a place for “fair” in the provocatively offensive pages of an unauthorized biography? It is to the detriment of the book that Taraborelli seems to have a reverence and sympathy for Taylor, for it lacks the bitchy bite that makes celebrity journalism so, well, Schadenfreude-y. Still, the enchanting Elizabeth does not fail to fascinate, whether we pity or revile her. As the writer characterizes her, she is unable to distinguish between onscreen and offscreen realities, always performing, while feeling deeply.
Overly worshipful, but you’d have to be quite jaded to be bored by this chronicle of a miniseries life.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-53254-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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