If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple,...
A fan’s gleeful, if excessive, double-take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art.
Novelist and London International Film School teacher Louvish continues his biographical exploration of the kings of American film comedy (Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, 1997, etc.) with a sprightly, sympathetic dual biography of the rotund, fastidious Georgia-born Oliver Norvell Hardy and his thin, feckless British sidekick, Arthur Stanley Jefferson, who legally adopted his vaudeville stage name of Stanley Laurel in 1931 after the duo’s two-reelers made for Hal Roach’s Culver City studio gathered world-wide fame. Louvish sees the pair’s comedy as bright flotsam in a historical gush starting with ancient Greece and coming up to Chaplin mentor Fred Karno (Laurel understudied for Chaplin) and to Laurel’s father, English theater owner and sketch writer Arthur Jefferson. Eager fan clubs that have named themselves after the duo’s spoof of the Sons of Desert masonic, have generated a stack of scholarly volumes that Louvish eagerly credits while offering some deathless revelations: Hardy offended his mother by marrying a Jew; Laurel’s comic inventiveness was rooted in older music-hall and vaudeville routines; the off-screen Hardy wasn’t quite the passive foil of Laurel’s fussy genius; and the outsize harridans wielding rolling-pins in the films were based on the pair’s exploitative studio bosses and on a string of mostly unhappy marriages (Hardy had three wives, Laurel five). Louvish lets his spotlight wander, as he did with Margaret Dumont in his Marx Brothers biography, Monkey Business (2000), by detailing the mostly unfulfilled lives of supporting actors, such as the bald and manically antagonistic Jimmy Finlayson.
If you skip the preaching to the choir and the film-school analysis, Louvish’s wide-eyed love for his subjects’ simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house. (Filmography and 52 b&w photos)Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-26651-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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