The second half of Powell's autobiography, like the first, shows the British filmmaker to be an exceptionally fine writer. Powell takes up the story where the first volume (A Life in Movies, 1987) left off, just after Powell and his partner, screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, had reached the top of the British film heap with The Red Shoes in 1948. In the second volume, sadly, things begin to fall apart for the Archers (as their film company was called). Unpleasant, even disastrous, involvement with Hollywood producers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick result in a string of flops. Although they recoup with the enormous commercial success of The Battle of the River Plate (1956), the partnership dissolves. Powell goes on to make Peeping Tom (1959), a masterpiece that enrages the critics with its violence, scaring the distributor into virtually suppressing the film. Powell goes to Australia, where he makes two successful films and jump-starts a moribund film industry. After that, however, the book becomes a depressing catalogue of projects not realized as onetime friends shun a filmmaker who they feel has grown too old to employ. As in the first book, Powell offers splendidly vivid descriptive writing, ruthlessly honest self-evaluations, and generous and evocative portraits of famous men and women as varied as Frederick Ashton, Alexander Korda, Thomas Beecham, Jennifer Jones, and Selznick. Unfortunately, Powell died after completing the first draft of the book and his widow, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, appears to have been reluctant to allow much tampering with his final work. As a result, the book occasionally rambles and sometimes reads like transcribed dictation (which much of it is). On the other hand, some of Powell's digressions are as fascinating as the story from which they divert us. A book of charm and panache, this is a lovely legacy. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43443-7
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
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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