A diverting meander through a life in showbiz.
The handsome actor reminisces about the passing of a more glamorous Hollywood, settles some old scores and examines his passionate relationship with Natalie Wood.
Perhaps best known for his role as the suave, mystery-solving millionaire on the TV series Hart to Hart, Wagner grew up struggling to please his distant, disapproving father. As a young actor, he was drawn to an older generation of male stars, idolizing and befriending the likes of James Cagney and Clark Gable in a bid for more congenial paternal lights to steer by. This identification with an older style of movie glamour slightly marginalized Wagner as the Method propelled intense, mumbling actors like James Dean and Paul Newman to superstardom, leaving him to flounder in a series of forgettable, lightweight parts. The preternaturally good-looking young man still managed to enjoy himself, cutting a mighty swath through hordes of hopeful starlets and not a few more mature actresses, including a memorable layover with the sultry Yvonne De Carlo. Wagner recounts these adventures in surprisingly salty detail, which is great fun. Less fun are his gripes about producers’ and directors’ unfairness or incompetence, tales of real-estate deals, anecdotes about children and the like, which will tax the patience of even the most generous reader. Fortunately, he provides much more gripping material concerning his stormy relationship with Wood. They were one of the original celebrity couples: Married in 1957, separated in 1961 and divorced a year later, they remarried in 1972 and were still together when she tragically drowned in a 1981 boating accident that has invited morbid speculation for decades. Wagner is open about the emotional torment he suffered during their separation, confessing to murderous feelings toward Warren Beatty, Wood’s post-divorce boyfriend. His account of the fateful boat trip, which included a protracted, nearly violent argument between Wagner and eccentric actor Christopher Walken, delivers a mesmerizing sense of queasy fatefulness.
A diverting meander through a life in showbiz.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-137331-2
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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