A boy wonder’s life—overlong but also filling.
Few directors in film history have generated more biographies than Orson Welles (1915-1985), and anyone tackling the job anew better have a fresh angle or something new to report. Veteran film scribe McGilligan (Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, 2011, etc.) meets this challenge by focusing exclusively on Welles’ early years, but his success is mixed. When he’s not leaning heavily on the work of his many predecessors—mainly Barbara Leaming, as well as Peter Bogdanovich, Simon Callow, and Frank Brady—as well as the bitter memoirs of Welles’ former friend John Houseman, he’s expanding heavily on stories they either succinctly boiled down or scraps they left behind, from Welles’ youthful poetry to day-by-day accounts of his international trips to microscopic rehashings of minor scuffles. While the book is needlessly long, McGilligan does illuminate the full scope of a truly charmed youth, and he reminds us that while it may be unfair to say that Welles peaked early, there were definitely a lot of peaks, even before he triumphed as the 25-year-old whiz behind Citizen Kane. The pampered son of an alcoholic businessman and a progressive socialite, he was raised to be a genius, and he didn’t disappoint. He was only 20 when he staged a revolutionary all-black Macbeth for the Federal Theater (“The great success of my life,” he called it), followed up by a modern-dress Julius Caesar and more theater successes, making the cover of Time even before he cooked up the idea of a live-radio Martian landing. Then it was on to Kane, which the author pieces together in generous detail, with specific attention to the much-debated relationship between Welles and co-scenarist Herman Mankiewicz.
McGilligan works overtime trying to justify such a massive book about only a part of Welles’ life, but it’s also buoyed by a dependably powerful subject at the center.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-211248-4
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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PROFILES
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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