The man now considered America's greatest movie star is chronicled seriously and fully, but not always movingly or with new critical insight. Unsurprisingly for a work by a veteran literary biographer (Robert Frost, 1996, etc.), Bogart radiates an erudition uncommon to film bios. It skillfully interweaves quotes from disparate sources (Umberto Eco, Michael Curtiz, and Groucho Marx within six paragraphs), and makes a logical link between Bogart and his tough-guy contemporary Ernest Hemingway; the book's opening pages are devoted to detailing the parallels between the two men. Meyers's respectful approach fits his subject, whom he presents as intellectually restless, morally upright, politically aware, and courageous in facing the esophageal cancer that killed him. As befits the genre, there are plenty of anecdotes, though some, like the Bogart-Bacall meeting on To Have and Have Not and George Raft's rejection of the lead role in The Maltese Falcon, are familiar. Meyers's look at Bogart's relationship with John Huston provides insight into how both worked, and the stormy marriage to Mayo Methot is played out in nice detail. Bacall comes off a bit tarnished here: She loved Bogart but was extravagant, infatuated with Adlai Stevenson, and had an affair with Sinatra at the end of Bogart's life. Most amusing are the author's throwaway lines (``Huston had always wanted to direct a movie from horseback. . . .'') and his list of Bogart's films, which are divided into four categories: Best, Important, Good, and Poor. In addition, there is ample film analysis (``Casablanca transcends its absurdities''), but little revelatory to readers familiar with the usual critical suspects. Still, the book succeeds at conveying Bogart's enduring strength as a star, a figure who, 40 years after his death, remains culturally and aesthetically alive. A refreshingly serious film biography that movie lovers will appreciate for approaching Bogart as a subject, not a celebrity. (49 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-77399-7
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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
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