Charming but slight reminiscences of a cinematic icon.
Michael Caine finds a third act.
The author’s second autobiographical work (What’s It All About?, 1992) revisits familiar territory—childhood poverty, the deprivations of World War II, faltering first steps in show business before signature roles in The Ipcress File (1965) and Alfie (1966) made him an international film star—but his warm, wry delivery keeps the material interesting, even though many of the anecdotes have a distinctly practiced feel. Caine devotes much space to his latter-day, post–leading man film career, a clear source of pride and delight for the actor who presumed, after a fallow period, that his career was effectively over in the early ’90s. The years since have found Caine doing acclaimed work in such worthy projects as The Cider House Rules (1999), The Prestige (2006), the Christopher Nolan Batman films and Inception (2010). The author is endearing in his appreciation of this unexpected phase of his career, but a little more analysis of the films, his acting process and insights into the industry would have been welcome. Instead, Caine is largely content to relate amusing stories or chivalrously praise co-stars such as Sandra Bullock. Some of the material is truly compelling—especially the disarming glimpses of the likes of Laurence Olivier and Steve Martin—but the general weightlessness of Caine’s reminiscences are a bit frustrating for the movie buff eager to plumb the memory of one of the cinema’s most distinctive stars. The author goes on at length about family crises, military experiences, his career as a restaurateur, old friendships and the like. One personal story that does resonate is Caine’s shocking late-in-life discovery of an adult half brother, institutionalized and suffering from severe brain damage, whose existence had been concealed by the author’s mother until her death. In Caine’s telling, the story would suit a small, serious film, with a juicy role for an older English actor of demonstrated range and power.
Charming but slight reminiscences of a cinematic icon.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9390-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
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