The famed cult-film director recalls the famous—and not-so-famous—people he has idolized over the years.
Waters is known for his campy, often hilarious films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and the mainstream hit Hairspray (1988). In this consistently charming and witty collection of essays, he fondly remembers the many artists he has admired throughout his life, from stars, such as Little Richard, to such near-unknown figures as the 1960s Baltimore stripper Lady Zorro. Though Waters jumps from subject to subject, he somehow integrates it all into a coherent whole. The chapter “Johnny and Me” combines the author’s interviews with legendary singer Johnny Mathis and the obscure actress Patty McCormack, who played an evil little girl in the 1954 movie The Bad Seed, as well as encomiums to the actress Margaret Hamilton and Bobby “Boris” Pickett, singer of the 1962 novelty hit “The Monster Mash.” Elsewhere, the author interviews two of his favorite underground gay pornographers in similarly rapturous terms. In general, Waters admires anyone who has the courage to follow his or her idiosyncratic muse, and he makes no distinction between so-called “high” and “low” art. The author is at his most engaging when he expresses disillusionment. For example, he counts a former member of the Manson Family, Leslie Van Houten, among his friends, and believes that she has reformed in prison—but he also expresses regret that he exploited the Manson murders for kitsch value in his early films. Waters also presents a poignant interview with Lady Zorro’s daughter, during which he learns that the outrageous personality he admired so much was actually masking a selfish, irresponsible alcoholic. The only misfire is a short, somewhat vague appreciation of Tennessee Williams, which lacks the zing of the rest of the portraits. Overall, however, Waters delivers a worthy tribute to his personal pantheon of artistic icons.
An impressive, heartfelt collection by a true American iconoclast.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-25147-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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