A solid if sometimes digressive portrait of a stoic, hardworking player, never really influential but certainly memorable.
In which living as Obi-Wan Kenobi proves to be the best revenge.
Born in 1914, Alec Guinness, writes novelist-historian Read (Alice in Exile, 2002, etc.), was a bastard—in that old-fashioned, literal sense, that is. “My mother was a whore,” Guinness plainly told his friend John le Carré, a bit peeved at the matter. Illegitimate birth was common in those days, of course, but bound to mark a person for life in class- and status-conscious England; so, too, were the psychic wounds left by a stepfather and an “uncle” or two. Guinness channeled his adriftness into art, though the road was rocky: his first acting teacher offered to refund his tuition after a handful of lessons, sure that he would never amount to anything. She was wrong: inside a few years, Guinness was a member of the Old Vic troupe of Shakespearean actors, renowned throughout Europe for his Hamlet. Along the way, he became friendly with John Gielgud and other stage actors who adopted him as their own, and he met his wife Merula, who had much acting ability herself. Her career, though, was “a casualty of Alec’s meteoric rise to fame,” Read writes, inasmuch as Guinness was one of those no-wife-of-mine types, an odd blend of conservative and progressive. (Read offers that Guinness later defended himself by saying that his wife was simply too good for the theater.) Constantly worried about money—and, Read ventures, by matters of sexual identity—Guinness dirtied himself with film work, for which he had natural and abundant talents. Channeling Guinness, who kept notes and diaries, Read trades in exquisite gossip about David Lean, Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and other actors and directors with whom he worked, closing with the Star Wars franchise, which Guinness found distasteful but which brought him the first real financial security he had known (“I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread”).
A solid if sometimes digressive portrait of a stoic, hardworking player, never really influential but certainly memorable.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4498-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
