An authoritative and perceptive portrait.
The illustrious career of “a great stage actress in both comedy and tragedy, and an international film star.”
Winner of two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes, and several Emmys, the internationally acclaimed Maggie Smith (b. 1934) is currently best known as Lady Violet on Downton Abbey. As British theater critic and biographer Coveney (Ken Campbell: The Great Caper, 2012, etc.) portrays her in this informative, well-crafted biography, Smith brings to her role as Dowager Countess the acerbic wit, sly irreverence, and masterly technique that have served her throughout her long career. Steeped in theater history, and with full cooperation from Smith; her husband, actor Beverley Cross; family and colleagues, including her close friend Judi Dench, Coveney seamlessly melds Smith’s personal and professional lives into an engrossing narrative. Smith’s stardom was ensured, the author believes, in 1960, when she received 12 curtain calls for her performance in J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows. In 1969, her role in The Prime of Miss Brodie earned her an Oscar. Besides “her incurably obsessive drive to be working,” Coveney writes, “she had a sure instinct about which work to do.” That work took her to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, London’s West End, Broadway, and Hollywood; from the start, she proved herself an astonishing comedienne. As Michael Caine, her co-star in Neil Simon’s California Suite, remarked, acting with Smith “was like attending a one-woman masterclass on comic technique.” On stage and screen, director Peter Wood said, Smith had a “telepathic ray” that connected with her audience. To co-stars, though, she could seem formidable: Michael Palin commented on “an intensity of animosity sometimes, which comes out in her acting and can be quite chilling.” Journalist Bernard Levin thought she constructed a “brittle facade” to hide her vulnerability. “I’m never shy on the stage,” she said. “Always shy off it.” “I don’t like myself very much,” she once admitted. “I’d much rather be someone else.”
An authoritative and perceptive portrait.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-08148-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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