A terrifically lucid and entertaining look at an undervalued area of Sinatra’s achievement.
The king of the saloon singers was a top-notch actor…when he cared to be.
So argues Santopietro (Considering Doris Day, 2007, etc.), who proves an ideal guide to Ol’ Blue Eyes’ spotty career as a screen actor. Combining a fan’s ardor and enthusiasm with keen critical insight, he convincingly makes the case for Sinatra as a major acting talent while taking the famously mercurial entertainer to task for wasting his prodigious gifts on frivolous projects. In conversational prose, Santopietro covers Sinatra’s family life, romances and recording career as they relate to his picture making, demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge of every theatrical and television film’s production details. The author analyzes each movie, often scene-by-scene, wittily explaining what works, what doesn’t and why. Clunkers like The Kissing Bandit receive the same close attention as triumphs like On the Town and The Man with the Golden Arm, the better to fully explicate the evolution of Sinatra’s craft and attitude toward the medium. Santopietro is engagingly thoughtful about the sources of the Sinatra mystique. He draws intriguing parallels between the singer’s storied insistence on “one take” and his neurotic drive to banish boredom and loneliness. The author relates Sinatra’s distinctively snappy way with a line of dialogue to his masterly phrasing of lyrics as a singer. Readers less inclined to this sort of Actors Studio musing will content themselves with irresistible gossip about Sinatra and various Hollywood legends, plus an authoritative accounts of the glory days of the MGM musicals that cemented Sinatra’s screen stardom. Film buffs will find much to savor as well. The section on The Manchurian Candidate, for example, illuminates the greatness of that strange film and of Sinatra’s performance. The Rat Pack, the Mafia, the washouts and comebacks…every aspect of the legend is intelligently addressed, but Santopietro’s interest is in Sinatra’s work. In the final analysis, that’s what fascinates.
A terrifically lucid and entertaining look at an undervalued area of Sinatra’s achievement.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36226-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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