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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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