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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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