An adequate reference work, but short on the mystique that makes Eastwood such a compelling subject.
The life and career of the ultimate Hollywood survivor.
Celebrity-bio vet Eliot (Reagan: The Hollywood Years, 2008, etc.) unpacks the legendary career of Clint Eastwood. The author provides scant details of Eastwood’s early life, noting his indifferent academic career and uneventful, middle-class upbringing. After a series of dead-end jobs, including a storied stint as a gas-station attendant, Eastwood, by dint of his angular good looks and strapping frame, slowly broke into the acting business, becoming a national celebrity playing cowboy Rowdy Yates on the long-running Rawhide TV series. His performance as Yates landed him the role of “The Man with No Name” in a series of seminal, operatic westerns directed by Sergio Leone. Eastwood attained worldwide iconic status as a deadly, laconic, grimly ironic prodigy of violence, further cemented by his series of ultraviolent turns as maverick cop Dirty Harry. Eliot declines to make detailed analyses of the films or the actor’s performances, focusing instead on the nuts and bolts of Eastwood’s preternaturally savvy careerist maneuvering and womanizing tendencies. Eastwood comes off as a rather cold, unpleasant character in these respects, using friendships and sexual dalliances to his advantage only to ruthlessly cut them off when they became inconvenient or tiresome. The autocratic star also made a habit of working with “weak” directors and co-stars to insure his dominance in his films. Eastwood’s directing career, including the Oscar-winning films Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), is recounted respectfully, but again Eliot focuses on the negotiations and profits rather than elucidating his style. On the other hand, the author clearly and succinctly summarizes Eastwood’s political and cinematic careers, including the history of his production company, Malpaso. His take on Eastwood’s shabby treatment of longtime girlfriend and frequent co-star Sondra Locke betrays a measure of sympathy for her position absent in his description of the star’s (many) other indiscretions.
An adequate reference work, but short on the mystique that makes Eastwood such a compelling subject.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-33688-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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