This lengthy biography of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy reveals lives as melodramatic and star-crossed as one of their movies—without the happy ending. Author Rich (president of one of four MacDonald/Eddy fan clubs still extant in the US) reveals more about the two lovers than even the most avid fan might want to know, including Nelson's descriptions of Jeanette's ``little nighties.'' The question it leaves unanswered is how the feisty soprano and the lusty baritone, certainly among Hollywood's most popular stars during the late 1930s and early '40s, managed to make such goulash of their love affair. Although both singers regularly denied it, according to Rich, they were attracted to each other from the moment they met. MacDonald was characterized as ``an ambitious career gal with a bad reputation'' and was rumored to be one of Louis B. Mayer's couch tomatoes. Mayer, in fact, frowned on the singers' relationship for professional as well as personal reasons, but cast them in Naughty Marietta, their first film together. It made the duet stars—and brought them to bed after nearly a year of stolen kisses. It wasn't romantic. In a jealous rage, Nelson raped Jeanette, according to Rich. But she forgave him, beginning a cycle of reconciliation and rejection that went on for 30 years, and included suicide attempts and miscarriages. In a rejection phase, MacDonald married actor Gene Raymond (who, she discovered, preferred men as sexual partners) while Eddy wed a possessive woman who refused divorce, in spite of his numerous infidelities (MacDonald was not the only liaison). A source for much of the material, including intimate details of the couples' private meetings, is Eddy's mother, Isabel, via her son's diaries and letters. A filmography is included. A bonanza for MacDonald/Eddy fans, a pan full of nuggets for aficionados of Hollywood and MGM, but an encyclopedic struggle for the less dedicated. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-407-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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