A dramatic, psychologically astute biography of the troubled sex symbol and star of such classics as Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch. Leaming’s (Katharine Hepburn, 1995, etc.) research is extensive and innovatively interpreted in this unusual biography, but she is bent on telling Marilyn’s story in a set, idiosyncratic way. This is both the great strength and weakness of her book. As a single, authoritative account, it cannot stand: Leaming omits too many telling details. Marilyn’s childhood, for example, is hurried through in a handful of pages. But as a portrait of the star’s conflicted, complicated nature and of those around her, this account is first-rate. Marilyn first landed in Hollywood as a “party girl,” a wanna-be starlet, who traded sex for possible career advancement. She had some small successes, until she cleverly promoted herself into a breakthrough role. Fame then came almost instantaneously. But Marilyn was increasingly unable to handle its demands. Making movies came to terrify her, and drugs, alcohol, and on-set acting coaches could do little to assuage her fears. The caddish, self-serving behavior of many of those around her did little to help. And her suicide at 36 is all too understandable here. Beyond her acute insights into Marilyn’s psyche, Leaming offers extensive acid-tipped portraits of those around her. Drama coach Lee Strasberg uses Marilyn to build up his prestige, regardless of the effects on her career or well-being. And second husband playwright Arthur Miller is a weak, self-justifying, egocentric who badly fails Marilyn. It’s indicative of the eccentricity and ingenuity of this account that Miller’s friendship/rivalry with the director Elia Kazan (another lover of Marilyn) occupies a central narrative position. Odd, but with a touch of genius. (32 paghes b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-517-70260-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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