Some good gossip, a few great parties (one from dusk till dawn for Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), lots of intelligent...
Four-time Tony Award–winner Caldwell’s engaging memoir of her apprentice years.
Born in Melbourne in 1933, daughter of a theater-loving plumber, young Zoe had considerable success in Australian radio and theater. She began globe-trotting in 1958, when she joined England’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. During three seasons (including a tour of the Soviet Union), she rose from small parts to play Cordelia opposite Charles Laughton’s King Lear, observing along the way such revered elder company members as Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, and Edith Evans, as well as gifted young contemporaries like Ian Holm and Albert Finney. Caldwell’s comments on the craft of acting are shrewd, her assessment of other performers appreciative but not uncritical. She watched Laughton carefully, she writes, “because in each performance he played one scene definitively. But only one, and it was never the same one.” She did more Shakespeare in Canada, toured Australia as Saint Joan, and joined the brand-new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, arguing with several directors along the way when the strongminded actress disagreed with their interpretations. She made her Broadway debut subbing for a vacationing Anne Bancroft in The Devils and valiantly played Tennessee Williams at his lowest commercial and critical ebb; Slapstick Tragedy won Caldwell her first Tony. By 1967, when she appeared at Stratford, Ontario, opposite Christopher Plummer in Antony and Cleopatra, she was in love with producer Robert Whitehead (now her husband) and was a seasoned professional who so shamed an audience of noisy schoolchildren when she broke character to reproach them that they called out, “Please continue, Cleopatra.” “We now live in a highly technological world,” she writes in closing. “But when communication is still made directly by living people standing in front of other living people . . . anything can happen.”
Some good gossip, a few great parties (one from dusk till dawn for Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy), lots of intelligent observations about acting and the stage: a treat for fans of theater autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04226-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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