Great actress, mediocre memoir.
Dench recalls her illustrious career in this rather flavorless memoir, tracking her storied performances in a staggering number of classical and contemporary stage works, TV series and films.
The author writes with a restraint that borders on the perverse, eschewing backstage gossip or personal introspection—or really much sentiment at all. She recounts a few mild pranks and standard actors’ complaints about less-than-ideal performance conditions, but most of the narrative just tallies up professional accomplishments, charting Dench’s relatively smooth ascension from respected repertory actress to Academy Award winner. With a few blandly complimentary phrases, she sums up co-stars such as Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, declining to discuss the differing processes of mounting films, TV series and stage shows, or her impressions of the differing performance cultures of Hollywood, Broadway and the English theater. Her English TV series As Time Goes By enjoys a devoted cult in the United States, but she has almost nothing to say about it beyond registering bemusement at the Internet-driven mania of its fan base. Dench was married to actor Michael Williams for nearly three decades and had a daughter with him, but he’s a vague, reassuring presence in the narrative whose death from cancer receives a rather cursory treatment here. The author’s English reserve is admirable, but the brisk manner in which she recounts the presumably central tragedy of her life points up the book’s ultimately off-putting coolness and perfunctory approach to autobiography. It’s more of a list than a story, and indeed the book’s most impressive section is a simple listing of Dench’s acting credits, limning a truly awesome body of work. Bits of her personality do peek through, chiefly a surprising tetchiness (she is not a great fan of journalists) that might have made the book more enjoyable if given free rein.
Great actress, mediocre memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65906-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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