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ANTHONY HOPKINS

THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

Writing his biography without the cooperation of Hopkins (now Sir Anthony), Callan (Julie Christie, 1985, etc.) leans heavily on the existing journalistic corpus for his chronicle of the bedeviled, Welsh actor, nominated this year for his second Academy Award. On the personal side, the book is weak and portentous. The telling of Hopkins's early years, as the only child of a prosperous baker from the district of Taibach, is drawn apparently from the authorized version, Quentin Falk's Anthony Hopkins. (Callan was shooed away from the actor's elderly mother and told to ``burn'' her phone number.) We must settle for the staccato recollections of childhood neighbors, e.g., ``I believe [Hopkins's father] slapped the boy a bit. Not because he was hard, but because he couldn't understand him.'' Similarly, the breakaway stuff—the shared bedsits, provincial rep, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, apprenticing at the National Theatre under Olivier—is also sparsely furnished. Callan indicates in his introduction that first wife Petronella Barker, who shared the actor's alcoholic storms, will take us places previously off-limits, but her input came with severe restrictions, and her insights are rather more short than gnomic. Happily, there is much here that works very well, notably the rendering of Hopkins's artistic development—the coming to grips with the feminine nature of his muse, the realization and final articulation of an easeful minimalism in his work, the birthing of which, however, took a ghastly toll. English film writer Tony Crawley contributed much new and previously published material. With Hopkins almost as hot as his demons, there will be attention paid.

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-684-19679-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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