A superbly wrought, aesthetically and psychologically acute portrait of Welles's sheer, undisciplined genius. The first of a projected two volumes, this biography takes Welles to the grand old age of 26 (where other talents usually begin their ascent to fame and fortune) and the release of his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. But what seemed like one more triumph in an ever more brilliant and audacious career was really a cresting of the flood, and the years to come, despite occasional squalls of genius, would be a sad, slow ebbing away. As Callow (Charles Laughton, 1988, etc.) notes, Welles had ``created a body of work in several media that he would never surpass: in the theater, in radio, in book illustration, in film.'' Welles was an awesomely precocious child. Even when he was a preschooler, most adults who encountered him, from preachers to postmen, felt certain he was destined for greatness. Some of this precocity was certainly due to Welles's ambitious, demanding mother. Her death when he was nine left him with a driving and lifelong sense of guilt and constant need to prove himself. Like its subject, this biography occasionally tends to flabbiness. Callow particularly overdetails Welles's substantial juvenilia (i.e., his accomplishments before he was 17). But rarely, perhaps not since Franáois Truffaut's book on Hitchcock, has an arts biographer possessed such a professional and intuitive understanding of his subject. Callow, a British actor (most recently in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and sometime director, offers innumerable hard-won insights into Welles's artistic processes, dissecting them with a careful, revealing hand, guided by his actor's eye for psychological underpinnings. His research is effortlessly vast, and Callow corrects many of the myths and dissemblings surrounding Welles, some of them put out by Welles himself. And this is all accomplished in a highly literate, epigrammatic style that makes this biography a sumptuous pleasure to read. A masterful effort. It will be a hard, fidgety wait for the second volume. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86722-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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