A text that thrums with life and assures the rest is not silence.
The inspiring, salacious, sad, materialistic, insecure, arrogant, hilarious and dull ruminations of a most gifted actor.
Burton was not assiduous about his diary. There are fascinating flurries of activity, generally surrounding his work on film (from The Taming of the Shrew to The Battle of Sutjeska) or on a play (a revival of Camelot in 1980). But there are also months, even years, that go by in silence. Occasionally, Burton had nothing to say—e.g., a six-day stretch in 1975 when each day’s entry offers but a single word: “Booze.” Burton struggled throughout his career with alcohol (the diary records alternating periods of abstinence and drunkenness) and cigarettes. He constantly battled his weight, as well, clearly disturbed when he was only a few pounds over what he wished to be. His relationship with his two-term wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor, will no doubt interest many readers, and the diary at times resembles a seismograph marking the rumbles in their relationship. The author often waxes eloquent about her, recording her beauty and her talent (he believed she was a gifted actress). Perhaps most impressive, however, is the catalog of Burton’s reading. He makes “voracious” sound feeble. He consumed mystery novels and thrillers, yes, but also Proust and Gibbon and weighty works of history and philosophy. (He read In Search of Lost Time twice, just to be sure.) When he was preparing for travel, he always assembled a thick stack of books to take with him. Williams (Welsh History/Swansea Univ.; Capitalism, Community and Conflict: The South Wales Coalfield, 1898-1947, 1998, etc.) provides scrupulous editing—there are a myriad of fascinating footnotes, only a few of which are questionable: Do we really need to be told who Mark Twain is?—and the book includes countless juicy comments from Burton about colleagues, directors, authors, family, politics and celebrity.
A text that thrums with life and assures the rest is not silence.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18010-7
Page Count: 546
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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