Self-aggrandizing, self-promotional, self-satisfied: Evans has produced a quintessential Hollywood memoir.
The notorious kid is still in the picture.
Former Paramount Studios head Evans (The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life, 1994) suffered three strokes in quick succession in 1998, at the age of 68. This sequel to his raunchy autobiography begins with that crisis and moves back and forth in time as Evans recalls his eventful life as actor, head of Paramount, independent producer, and, lately, comedian and voice-over talent. Producing such iconic movies as The Godfather, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story and the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby—to name just a few—it’s no wonder that Evans knows everyone who is anyone in the place he affectionately calls Tinseltown. Names drop like snowflakes in a blizzard: Frank Sinatra, (“Whatever Frank wanted, Frank got,” Evans notes), Mia Farrow, Gene Kelly, Aristotle Onassis, Dustin Hoffman, Ali McGraw (one of seven former wives), Evans’ good buddies Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Barry Diller: a cast of thousands. Evans is not a man to cross, and he makes clear that he was determined to claw his way back after his strokes, with help from the often invoked “Guy Upstairs.” In the first weeks, he allowed no visitors: “Call it ego, narcissism, self-pity, horrendous pain, shame at my distorted face”—he could not bear to see their reactions. He deeply resented his doctor, who cautioned him against resuming his former lifestyle, and the ministrations of his three therapists—physical, speech and occupational—but finally gave himself up to months of grueling rehabilitation. During that period, barely able to walk, he managed to persuade Catherine Oxenberg, a much younger actress, to marry him. That escapade—the marriage was annulled within a week—Evans blames partly on the drug cocktails he was taking for his ailments, which turned him “into one dangerously delusional junkie.”
Self-aggrandizing, self-promotional, self-satisfied: Evans has produced a quintessential Hollywood memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-228604-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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