Whether you were well-acquainted with Fisher or not, this book will make you miss her.
An intimate and effusive tribute to Carrie Fisher (1956-2016).
Between traditional biography and commemorative journalism lies a place where facts meet fandom, where both casual observers and devotees alike can bear witness to an extraordinary life. Weller (The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News, 2014, etc.) could find those coordinates in her sleep. That’s not to say she didn’t work incredibly hard to pull together this endearing collection of stories about the late actor. The author is a seasoned veteran of panoramic storytelling; as a result, her narrative is occasionally almost as difficult to keep up with as Fisher herself. The book begins and ends with the fateful trans-Atlantic flight that signaled her impending death, but in between, readers have more than 300 pages to fall in love with the quirky, brilliant, outrageously witty woman who graced the silver screen as Princess Leia, among other roles. Weller interviewed scores of Fisher’s friends, former lovers, colleagues, and family members to shape a mostly chronological, highly detailed rendering of her life. The author dives deep into her subject’s childhood, films, books, marriages, friendships, and highly publicized battles with addiction and mental illness. The latter two elements provide some of the most poignant moments of the book, as readers get a revealing look at Fisher’s eventual acceptance of—and fierce honesty about—living with drug addiction and bipolar disorder. Occasionally, the dizzying array of quotes and voluminous backstories of Fisher’s friends and family get a bit taxing, and the book is brimming with gossipy tidbits. Regardless, Weller connects the dots in ways that create a vividly hued portrait. There is no monochrome here but rather an expansive look at a woman who lived large, loved deeply, and did a lot to destigmatize mental illness.
Whether you were well-acquainted with Fisher or not, this book will make you miss her.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28223-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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