Christie’s significance as an actress and cultural icon await a more perceptive appraisal.
Shallow biography of the renowned film, stage and TV actress.
A varied and celebrated acting career, a history of political activism and an outspoken personality make Julie Christie an ideal subject for biography. Unfortunately, British entertainment journalists Ewbank and Hildred offer very little beyond what exists in previously published accounts. The authors begin with Christie’s childhood in India and boarding school in England, glossing over the family discord that may have informed her career. Though she grew up to star in films both groundbreaking (Billy Liar, Darling) and epic (Doctor Zhivago, Far from the Madding Crowd), the accounts of these works given here consistently strike one or two notes: Christie was chronically insecure about her talent; she was a stunning beauty loved by the camera. The films’ production histories are fairly well detailed, but analysis of the work seldom goes deeper than the surface. As to why the eminent director John Schlesinger failed in his adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the authors note, “somewhere in the mix wise heads detected trouble.” This same lack of critical acumen precludes a definitive assessment of Christie’s acting; instead, the authors pay a great deal of attention to Christie’s highly publicized romantic affairs. Her relationship with lothario Warren Beatty merits an entire chapter in which at least some note is made of the two films they made together, Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. But even that section is padded out with an extended, irrelevant discussion of the sound-recording technique Beatty used in Bonnie and Clyde, a film in which Christie was not involved. Notes on Christie’s face-lift preface a thin summary of her recent, stunning work as a woman with Alzheimer’s in Away from Her.
Christie’s significance as an actress and cultural icon await a more perceptive appraisal.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-233-00255-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Andre Deutsch/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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