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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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