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
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. . . . In the meantime, in between time, we can see. . . we can work at making sense of (what) we see. . . to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. It's common sense; when you-move in, you try to learn the neighborhood." Dillard's "neighborhood" is hilly Virginia country where she lived alone, but essentially it is all those "shreds of creation" with which every human is surrounded, which she is trying to learn, to know — from finite variations to infinite possibilities of being and meaning. A tall order and Dillard doesn't quite fill it. She is too impatient to get about the soul's adventures to stay long with an egg-laying grasshopper, or other bits of flora and fauna, and her snatches from physics and biological/metaphysical studies are this side of frivolous. However, Ms. Dillard has a great deal going for her — in spite of some repetition of words and concepts, her prose is bright, fresh and occasionally emulates (not imitates) the Walden Master in a contemporary context: "Trees. . . extend impressively in both directions, . . . shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach." She has set herself no less a task than understanding emotionally, spiritually and intellectually the force of the creative extravagance of the universe in all its beauty and horhor ("There is a terrible innocence in the benumbed world of the lower animals, reducing life to a universal chomp.") Experience can be focused, and awareness sharpened, by a kind of meditative high. Thus this becomes somewhat exhausting reading, if taken in toto, but even if Dillard's reach exceeds her grasp, her sights are leagues higher than that of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, regretfully (re her sex), the inevitable comparison.
Pub Date: March 13, 1974
ISBN: 0061233323
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1974
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