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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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