More a résumé than a life. For diehard fans only.
Another conscientious text that plods through its subject’s life yet misses the insights that really inform. Here, British biographer Miller covers all the minutiae but never makes the legendary actor, writer, and director transcend the sum of his many parts.
Unlike many other claimants to the title, Peter Ustinov is indeed a Renaissance man. He’s acted in film, theater, and television; written novels and scripts; and directed plays, operas, and movies. He’s also an exemplary citizen who has worked on behalf of international organizations like UNICEF and founded an institute in England to study prejudice. Born in 1921 in London to Russian parents whose colorful ancestry included Germans, French, and Ethiopians, Ustinov has always had an international perspective and following, which Miller dutifully records. The author covers all the steps in Ustinov’s path to Grand Old Man, including his adolescent drama lessons, first appearances on the English stage, and time out as a private in WWII producing military training films with actors like David Niven. Success as an actor and a playwright was swift, and Miller lists the numerous plays Ustinov acted in as well as those he wrote (The Love of the Four Colonels, Romanoff and Juliet, etc.), the films he acted in (winning Oscars for Spartacus and Topkapi), the books he wrote, the operas he directed, his television appearances, numerous honors including a knighthood, friendships with luminaries like Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Charles Laughton. A convivial man who likes fast cars and tennis, Ustinov is also a great comic and mimic. Miller briefly notes his three marriages, the third now in its fourth decade, and the existence of three daughters and a son. Despite many appreciative testimonies and anecdotes from colleagues, Ustinov remains elusive under his many hats.
More a résumé than a life. For diehard fans only.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-297-64660-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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