There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but compleatist fans of Wayne and Ford will enjoy revisiting the films discussed.
Biography of the two figures, actor and director, who defined the Western film genre.
John Wayne (1907-1979) started in film, as Schoenberger (English and Creative Writing/Coll. of William and Mary; Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood, 2001, etc.) observes, as a “mere stagehand.” However, by the time director John Ford (1894-1973) caught up to him, he had already made a few small films as a lead or supporting actor—unsuccessfully, to be sure. Tyrannical and exacting—and, the author posits late in the book, tied up in knots by sexual-identity insecurity—Ford led Wayne to stardom through seven major Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that are held up today as canonical. Ford’s contributions were many. Apart from the technical aspects of his directorial work, he also had a nuanced sense of storytelling and of the grays between the black and white edges of morality that made his films more interesting than those Wayne made on his own, such as the simple-minded epics The Green Berets and The Alamo, “derailed by his ultrapatriotism,” Schoenberger remarks while enumerating the masculine-virtue qualities Ford helped Wayne express. “No other director and actor created the ideal of the American hero more than Ford and Wayne,” writes the author, going on to illustrate her case with those major films while noting other waypoints in Wayne’s career, such as Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys and Don Siegel’s The Shootist—both films in which Wayne’s character dies, something contemporary audiences didn’t much care for. Allowing that she is “not alone among women” in enjoying Westerns, Schoenberger serves up an intelligently crafted narrative that never runs as deep as it might. For that, readers are better served by Scott Eyman’s John Wayne (2013) and especially Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers (2014), the latter of which covers much of the same ground more compellingly.
There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but compleatist fans of Wayne and Ford will enjoy revisiting the films discussed.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53485-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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
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