A spirited biography of a complicated, combative, self-aggrandizing, and tormented man.
The gossip-filled, star-studded life of a writer who thrived on scandal.
Journalist, novelist, and TV and film producer Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) had two favorite pursuits: gossip—the more salacious the better—and star-watching. Sharing his subject’s fascination for celebrities behaving badly, TheWrap lead theater critic Hofler (Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange: How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos, 2014, etc.) proves to be an apt and entertaining chronicler of Dunne’s eventful, turbulent, and often sorrowful life. As a child, Dunne was belittled by his father, who called him a sissy, regularly whipped him, and incited his fear that he really was a girl trapped in a boy’s body. “I never felt I belonged anywhere, even in my own family,” Dunne admitted later. Hofler highlights Dunne’s difficult relationship with his younger brother, writer John Gregory Dunne, husband of Joan Didion, from whom Dominick was estranged for many years. But Dunne’s family interests Hofler less than his cavorting with celebrities. On the set of Ash Wednesday (1973), which Dunne produced, Elizabeth Taylor was demanding and roaring drunk. She began with bloody marys in the morning (a 16-ounce glass of vodka with a splash of tomato juice) followed by wine at lunch and Jack Daniels all afternoon. At one party (the book is filled with them), the sexually insatiable Rudolf Nureyev sequestered himself in a cottage “and quickly inspired two dozen men to offer him their bodies.” A closeted homosexual, Dunne married, had two sons, and tried, unsuccessfully, to play the family man until his wife divorced him. One son violently resented him for many years; the other, more charitably, realized that his father’s “big mouth, getting hammered and telling stories out of school” ensured his popularity. Dunne’s reputation as a journalist soared when he covered sensational murder trials for Vanity Fair, including O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Phil Spector, Michael Skakel, and, not least, the man accused of murdering Dunne’s daughter.
A spirited biography of a complicated, combative, self-aggrandizing, and tormented man.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-299-31150-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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