For die-hard movie buffs and Spacek fans only.
An average memoir from the renowned actress.
Beginning with her childhood in Quitman, Texas, Spacek then chronicles her move to New York City after high school to pursue a singing career. During her time in the city, she subsisted on part-time work and help from her parents. She played the guitar and sang at a local bar and took classes at the Lee Strasberg Actors’ Studio. After filming her first movie, Prime Cut (1972), Spacek moved to Los Angeles. She was then cast in Terrence Malick’s classic Badlands (1973), where she met her future husband Jack Fisk, who was the art director of the movie. The memoir then recalls Spacek’s life during and after her big break as the lead actress in Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976). After winning an Oscar for the role of country singer Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Spacek took a self-imposed hiatus and moved to the country to enjoy nature, horses and a calm family life. Even though she made family life her priority, she continued to act in movies while raising her daughters; Spacek almost always brought her entire family on set. She returned to acting in the ’90s and won an Oscar nomination for her role in Todd Fields’ In the Bedroom (2001). Much of this overly detailed book lacks a narrative arc, but the author comes off as truly down-to-earth, a value she preaches throughout the book. As the title states, the book is “ordinary” and does not have enough drama to engage readers not directly interested in Spacek and her work.
For die-hard movie buffs and Spacek fans only.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2436-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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