Gabler’s remarkable biography lends Mickey’s creator new dimensions and sets the standard for future biographies.
Monumental life of the contradictory impresario who founded a powerful entertainment empire and, for better or worse, “helped establish American popular culture as the dominant culture in the world.”
Forty years after his death, Walt Disney still epitomizes what is right and wrong with American life, depending on who’s making the argument. Film historian Gabler (Life, the Movie, 1998, etc.) shrewdly observes, for instance, that though Disney was notoriously conservative—and casually anti-Semitic and racist—he also forged aspects of the 1960s counterculture’s identity: anti-authoritarianism, connection to nature, “antagonism toward the moneyed class.” Born with “platonic templates in his head,” in Gabler’s memorable formulation, Disney idealized rural life, his template being the little Missouri town in which his father perpetually failed. Walt enshrined that place as an American idyll and ideal in Disneyland, which the author rightly ranks high among the master’s dreams-turned-to-reality. He was like his father, Gabler notes, in never having any business sense; brother and long-suffering partner Roy had the head for commerce. Walt lived a rather bohemian life beholden to no boss and sparked great resentment among his own employees by presenting the Disney studio’s products to the world as if they were single-handedly his. “He’s a genius at using someone else’s genius,” one disgruntled animator griped. For all that, Gabler makes emphatically clear, Disney was indeed a genius at his art: brilliant at drawing, writing and particularly editing, willing to exceed budgets time and again until an animation or a movie was exactly right. Thus Snow White, the 1937 film that put him on the map, was very nearly the Heaven’s Gate of its time in terms of cost overruns, yet once released it would become the highest-grossing film in history and hold that record for many years.
Gabler’s remarkable biography lends Mickey’s creator new dimensions and sets the standard for future biographies.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-43822-X
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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