by Robert Sellers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2016
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
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by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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by Tom Clavin
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by Bob Drury & Tom Clavin
by Emmanuel Carrère translated by Linda Coverdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2011
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
BOOK REVIEW
by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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