A sturdy, sympathetic biography about one of pop culture’s rangiest creators.
A full-dress biography of a quintessential artist who mastered stage, screen, and (especially) comedy.
Mike Nichols (1931-2014) was a one-man argument against auteur theory: What aesthetic sensibility unifies his spiky routines with Elaine May, the gentle Neil Simon comedies he directed, films like The Graduate and Working Girl, and his epic TV adaptation of Angels in America? In this thorough and compassionate life, Harris doesn’t search too hard for a common thread; more than anything, it seems, Nichols was hungry for an audience’s attention and had an innate enough grasp of staging and actors to (usually) get it. The son of German immigrants, he was a college dropout who formed a tight (but not romantic) bond with May, who shared his taste in brainy comedy and disaffection with 1950s supper-club stand-up. Their success in New York gained him entry to Broadway and then Hollywood, where his acclaimed adaptations of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate made him a household name. Just as important for Nichols, success opened doors to high society, where he was guided by photographer Richard Avedon. (Harris debunks reports they had a sexual relationship.) Nichols ran hot and cold professionally, and the author is refreshingly honest about creative low points like Day of the Dolphin as well as his mercurial, addictive personality. He could be snappish and patrician with casts and crews, and by the 1980s, he had developed a Halcion addiction and a crack habit. Nichols’ scattershot output makes him difficult to pin down, and by structuring the biography around his projects, Harris underdevelops his subject’s inner character; we learn nearly as much about his prized Arabian horses as his children. It may simply be that Nichols’ life was his work, but focusing on his creative triumphs at times obscures the man who made them.
A sturdy, sympathetic biography about one of pop culture’s rangiest creators.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-399-56224-2
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.
The late novelist and journalist records her innermost, deeply personal struggles.
Didion died in 2021. Afterward, a file of private notes was discovered among her things, including notes addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, recounting sessions with the noted Freudian psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, “a staunch defender of talk therapy.” Talk they do, with Didion serving up a battery of problems and MacKinnon offering wise if perhaps non-actionable responses to them, for instance, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it.” It’s not easy, for sure, and Didion’s chief concern throughout is her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died after a long illness, the subject of Didion’s 2011 memoir Blue Nights. Indeed, so many of the conversations concern Quintana that Didion—by design, one supposes—skirts her own issues, although MacKinnon identifies some: “I did think you might have developed more self-awareness,” he says, referring to Didion’s habit of squirreling herself away whenever difficult subjects arose. Didion counters that she cherishes privacy, adding that she sometimes left her own parties to shelter in her office and admitting that her long habit of overwork was a means of emotional distancing. It’s not wholly that Didion lacks that self-awareness, but that the keenest insights about her come from others, as when she records, “I said a friend had once remarked that while most people she knew had very strong competent exteriors and were bowls of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.” That Didion was constantly anxious, sometimes to the point of needing medication, will come as no surprise to close readers of her work, but the depth of her anguish and guilt over her inability to save her daughter—she threw plenty of money at her, but little in the way of love—is both affecting and saddening.
Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803677
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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