A complex, intimate, and illuminating inquiry into and defense of Brando.
A new biography of a legendary actor who “used his fame to draw attention to racism and injustice.”
It has been 25 years since Peter Manso’s 1,000-page Brando: The Biography, and award-winning biographer Mann (The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family, 2016, etc.) believes Manso (and “conventional wisdom”) incorrectly portrays Brando (1924-2004) as “eccentric, erratic, narcissistic and hypocritical.” In this meticulously researched book, bolstered by access to the Brando estate, Mann “attempts to see Brando’s life, career, choices, and actions in a new light.” The author describes him as a “thinker, an observer, an examiner of himself and the world, with the goal of figuring out both.” He sympathetically portrays Brando as a survivor of childhood trauma, the only son of alcoholic parents: an abusive father and a distant, neglectful mother Brando loved dearly. Mann begins in 1943 in New York City, where the impoverished high school dropout studied at the New School’s Dramatic Workshop. He was insecure about many things but not sex, and his womanizing would always be a problem. The gifted teacher, Stella Adler, took “her young student under her wing.” She wanted to make him great, but for Brando, acting would always be a “lark, a game of pretense.” Although he was in a dark place, Brando did A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway primarily because of director Elia Kazan, whom Brando greatly admired. After its success, Mann writes, he “knew his life was no longer his own.” In 1963, he walked with the Congress on Racial Equality—he believed that “if more people knew about the reality of racial discrimination, they wouldn’t stand for it”—and he was furious over what the studio did to his directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks. Throughout, Mann balances Brando’s reluctance to act with excellent insights into his finest performances. Brando enjoyed the improvisation he brought to The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris; it made acting seem “fun and creative.” For Mann, Brando was always a “searcher” who “spent his life trying to become ever more conscious.”
A complex, intimate, and illuminating inquiry into and defense of Brando.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-242764-9
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
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