Bears out the suspicion that Richard Stirling’s unrevealing Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography (2008) faithfully reflects...
Closing on the eve of her Oscar-winning film debut in Mary Poppins, Andrews’s memoir focuses on a young and, in most respects, rather ordinary girl with a complicated home life and a freakishly precocious larynx.
Christened Julia Wells, the author writes evocatively of her youth in bomb-ravaged London, and of accompanying her musical mother and stepfather (the source of her current surname) as they worked the punishing music-hall circuit, dogged by alcoholism and precarious finances. Prepubescent Julie, with her strikingly mature coloratura, eventually became the act’s star attraction and the family’s chief breadwinner. All this is clearly and elegantly presented—Andrews’s limpid prose style has earned her considerable success as an author of children’s books—but curiously muted, as she admits to generic feelings of sadness or stress but declines to further explicate her inner life. It remains unclear whether this is simply the evidence of a fundamentally reserved personality, or if Andrews lacks the complexity usually associated with artists of her accomplishments. Her oddly bloodless accounts of her relationships with her feckless, selfish mother, overbearing, mildly predatory stepfather and loyal first husband offer few clues. Andrews conveys real feeling only when discussing her beloved father, Ted Wells, a gentle teacher and nature lover whose simple enjoyment of hearth, home and the natural world seems central to her cozy worldview. The latter half of the narrative is manna for musical-theater buffs: Writing about her phenomenal Broadway successes in My Fair Lady and Camelot, Andrews provides entertaining gossip about Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Lerner and Loewe, and Moss Hart, as well as insightful, informative analysis of the technical aspects of her craft.
Bears out the suspicion that Richard Stirling’s unrevealing Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography (2008) faithfully reflects its subject’s personality.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7868-6565-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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