A dazzling debut in which the actor known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” reveals himself.
A cartoonist, designer, and filmmaker captures the voice and soul of Lon Chaney (1883-1930).
Dorian, an instructor at Pratt and the School of Visual Arts whose credits range from the New Yorker to the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, calls this “an imagined biography.” That description, while useful, doesn’t fully convey the power of this impressively ambitious work of imagination. The narrative is more of an imagined autobiography in which Chaney, who “chose to keep his personal life hidden,” opens up and tells all—or at least most. Dorian’s audacious, vital illustrations reflect the artistic spirit of the era and the rise of the star from humble means through vaudeville and a series of starring film roles, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Chaney and the motion picture industry came of age together, and, with a troubled marriage and a son to support, he would do whatever it took to set himself apart from other actors. When he learned that he could make an extra $5 per day on horseback for a cowboy role, he hopped right on. “And so I began my career in film as a centaur, part man…part horse,” Chaney says, before revealing the contents of his “magic box,” which allowed him to transform himself into whatever a role might call for long before the wizardry of makeup and special effects. “I searched for something that other actors couldn’t…or wouldn’t do,” he explains. “I threw myself into each part physically and mentally….A cast of my head, made by a sculptor, gave me another canvas to experiment with.” As the narrative takes readers through the films, the period-piece artistry suggests Dorian’s labor-of-love passion for the project, making us care for Chaney as much as he does.
A dazzling debut in which the actor known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces” reveals himself.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4743-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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