A well-researched and thoroughly entertaining dual biography.
A filmmaker and screenwriter’s biographical account of two 19th-century theater divas and their fabled feud.
As Rader (Mike Wallace: A Life, 2012) notes, before the rise of French acting superstar Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) in the 1860s, popular theater was little more than a vaudevillian “social experience.” Actors earned neither money nor respect for their work. Bold and charismatic, Bernhardt took the “highly stylized” art of acting, which portrayed archetypes rather than real human beings, to a level never seen before. Her efforts and her eccentricities—e.g., traveling with a pet alligator and sleeping in a coffin—along with her scandalous affairs, earned the French actress wealth, fame, and legions of adoring fans all over the world. While the world reveled in the on- and offstage antics of “The Divine One,” Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), an actress 14 years Bernhardt’s junior, was gaining national attention in Italian newspapers. The flamboyant Bernhardt’s temperamental opposite, Duse gravitated toward naturalistic stage representations and portrayed her characters as “multidimensional, shaded, and complex” figures. Duse first saw Bernhardt appear in an 1882 production of her signature play, La Dame aux Camélias. Enchanted by the older actress’s talent and success, Duse made Bernhardt her role model. As critics across Europe began to take positive notice of Duse’s revolutionary acting methods, they also began to critique Bernhardt for her “dated style.” Soon the two divas began poaching plays, playwrights, and even lovers from each other. Before Bernhardt was able to perform playwright Giacomo Giacosa’s rendering of La Dame on Broadway in 1891, for example, Duse performed Giacosa’s translated version for Italian audiences first. Several years later, Bernhardt took poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio—whom Duse adored like no other—as her lover. Delightfully readable and informative, Rader’s book examines a rivalry that defined modern theater while also exploring the origins of modern celebrity culture.
A well-researched and thoroughly entertaining dual biography.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3837-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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