The movie actor with the face of a wooden Viking—and the acting ability generally associated with that substance—has dropped the wheel of his famous schooner long enough to produce an autobiography. When amateur actor turns novice author reason dictates that the same motive force is at work in both jobs— the need for money. Indeed, Hayden is honest about it. Hayden is honest about everything. It is the honesty of the man that saves the book. Technically, the book as autobiography has so much wrong with it in its parts that it offers a reviewer's field day: i.e., interrupted flashbacks; the use of "I", "he", "you" to describe himself; a total self-concentration. However, taken as a whole, it is the interesting story of an interesting man. His description of growing up in the '30's and a boyhood under the wing of a con-man stepfather brings a time and a person to wretched life. His indictment of Hollywood comes as no surprise but is revealing of the Hollywood attitude toward their art—pulchritude is enough. Two years ago, Hayden's flight with his custody torn children made national headlines and won him the acclaim that his acting never did. That incident exposed him as the book does—a determined individualist and a romantic—the 19th century hero chained in 20th century red tape. With the total unselective recall of a man who has had psychiatrists, Hayden has produced a surprising book that will be read.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1963
ISBN: 1574090488
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1963
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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