Writing his biography without the cooperation of Hopkins (now Sir Anthony), Callan (Julie Christie, 1985, etc.) leans heavily on the existing journalistic corpus for his chronicle of the bedeviled, Welsh actor, nominated this year for his second Academy Award. On the personal side, the book is weak and portentous. The telling of Hopkins's early years, as the only child of a prosperous baker from the district of Taibach, is drawn apparently from the authorized version, Quentin Falk's Anthony Hopkins. (Callan was shooed away from the actor's elderly mother and told to ``burn'' her phone number.) We must settle for the staccato recollections of childhood neighbors, e.g., ``I believe [Hopkins's father] slapped the boy a bit. Not because he was hard, but because he couldn't understand him.'' Similarly, the breakaway stuff—the shared bedsits, provincial rep, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, apprenticing at the National Theatre under Olivier—is also sparsely furnished. Callan indicates in his introduction that first wife Petronella Barker, who shared the actor's alcoholic storms, will take us places previously off-limits, but her input came with severe restrictions, and her insights are rather more short than gnomic. Happily, there is much here that works very well, notably the rendering of Hopkins's artistic development—the coming to grips with the feminine nature of his muse, the realization and final articulation of an easeful minimalism in his work, the birthing of which, however, took a ghastly toll. English film writer Tony Crawley contributed much new and previously published material. With Hopkins almost as hot as his demons, there will be attention paid.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19679-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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