Overlong, yet never dull. Server writes with a contagious enthusiasm for his subject and a solid grasp of Hollywood history...
Little falls on the cutting room floor is this full-dress biography of a screen icon.
If a photo of a stunning beauty in a New York City photographer’s window hadn’t caught the eye of a passerby, Ava Gardner might have spent an uncomplicated life as a secretary and mother in North Carolina. Alas, the photo captured the attention of MGM, always eager to hang another star in the heavens. Hollywood historian Server (Robert Mitchum, 2001, etc.) covers—down to the last also-ran—the turbulent life and career that ensued. Clearly, the camera loved Ava, but that didn’t mean she was a shallow stunner who couldn’t act. George Cukor, directing her in Bhowani Junction, sensed in her work the power of Garbo. Her performance in Mogambo garnered an Oscar nomination, while critics and audiences lauded her for On the Beach and Seven Days in May. Dross along the way—55 Days in Peking and something called Tam Lin—mattered little to her: Love, sex and booze formed the core of her life. Relationships (with Howard Hughes, a matador, several leading men and many extras, including, perhaps, a few women) and marriages (to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra) were passionate, violent and beyond her control—she kept going back to lover George C. Scott, who kept knocking her around. Wounds were salved by drunken debauchery—the Ritz Hotel in Madrid banned her from the premises after she urinated in the lobby. Alone, but tranquil in her sad final days, she listened to Sinatra’s recordings and leafed through a packet of his love letters.
Overlong, yet never dull. Server writes with a contagious enthusiasm for his subject and a solid grasp of Hollywood history that Ava’s fans and film buffs will enjoy.Pub Date: April 18, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-31209-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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