Affectionate, workmanlike, but disappointing biography of the woman aptly described by Roger Vadim as ``Eve before God lost his temper in the Garden of Eden.'' As much a sociological event as a movie star, Brigitte Bardot transformed modern notions of sex as a subject for movies and as a paradigm for existence. Her mentors, particularly director and first husband Vadim, certainly helped to create the Bardot phenomenon. But Robinson (Yamani, 1989, etc.) shows that the actress's fame arose primarily from the force of her stunning yet simple beauty and her complex yet innocent nature. Unfortunately, his unambitious book does little to elucidate her character. In fairly pedestrian prose, he covers Bardot's life from her birth in Paris in 1934 to her quiet existence today in St. Tropez and her controversial marriage to Bernard d'Ormale, who is associated with ultranationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Robinson delineates Bardot's wildly dichotomous personality, her naive narcissism, her many lovers and husbands, her heartfelt advocacy of animal rights, and the relentless harassment she endured from the media and fans alike. Most of the events described in the book are interesting. Some, such as the relentless publicity surrounding her pregnancy in 1959 (journalists even tried bribing doctors to let them into the delivery room), are horrifying. Yet all but the most avid fans will eventually find Robinson's narrative tedious and repetitious. What little analysis there is—a discussion of French women's use of sex as a weapon, the claim that Bardot was the unwitting forebear of the women's movement—proves fleeting and shallow. Similarly, the author provides no insight into Bardot's films, not even ones as famous as Vadim's And God Created Woman and Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-FÇminin. Despite his best efforts to the contrary, Robinson leaves one feeling that perhaps there really is no more to Bardot than meets the eye. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-452-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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