This engrossing biography of an often excruciatingly difficult though uniquely gifted actor should encourage readers to seek...
The life and career of enigmatic stage and film actor Peter O’Toole (1932-2013).
Contemporary audiences may best know O’Toole from his luminous portrayal of T.E. Lawrence in David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia, but he had a varied career that spanned several decades, earning him significant critical notice through the years and an impressive eight Academy Award nominations. O’Toole rode the crest of his stardom in the 1960s, when, fresh from his star-making turn as Lawrence, he was busily sought after for numerous leading film roles. Yet his increasing alcohol consumption and a habitually chaos-driven personal life frequently intersected with his professional pursuits and gradually began to undermine his career. Sellers (What Fresh Lunacy Is This?: The Authorised Biography of Oliver Reed, 2013, etc.) provides a well-researched and colorful overview of O’Toole’s background, from his earliest theatrical performances through the many films and stage productions of later years. The author also focuses a lot of attention on the destructive side of his subject’s personality, diligently tracking every extended pub crawl and public disturbance he caused. O’Toole’s high jinks were often in the company of other notable talents of his generation, several of whom have become inebriated legends in their own rights, including actors Richard Burton and Richard Harris, who, together with O’Toole and Oliver Reed, were the subject of an earlier Sellers biography, Hellraisers (2009). Chronicling the latter portion of O’Toole’s career, with his stardom diminished and a few life-threatening episodes forcing him to abstain, at least somewhat, from drinking, the author gradually shifts his focus to O’Toole’s craft as an actor and his particular skills for building his performances. This approach leads to greater insight into his personality and provides more depth to the narrative.
This engrossing biography of an often excruciatingly difficult though uniquely gifted actor should encourage readers to seek out some of O’Toole’s many memorable film performances.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09594-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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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