A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a...
A former movie producer and, subsequently, chronicler of Hollywood legends (Marlene Dietrich, 1992) and legendary fiascos (Final Cut, 1985) revisits what a documentary filmmaker once called “the wonderful, horrible life” of cinema’s most controversial figure.
This second recent biography of Riefenstahl focuses a bit more on her cinematic style than its predecessor, Jürgen Trimborn’s Leni Riefenstahl (Jan. 2007). Trimborn had the advantages (and frustrations) of interviews with Riefenstahl (who died in 2003 at 101), but Bach has an insider’s view of how films are produced. Still, the two books cover much the same ground and issue many of the same judgments. Bach begins with a snapshot of the Berlin film world of 1925, then returns to the birth and childhood of Helene Amalia Bertha Riefenstahl, born 1902. (Cross-eyed as an infant, Leni would in a metaphorical sense never lose that disability.) Young Leni desperately wanted a career in the arts. She tried dance, sustained an injury, segued smoothly into the nascent film industry, where she acted in some popular alpine films, then moved behind the camera. Her great assets were her stunning beauty, her ferocious work ethic and her ability to curry favor. In 1930s Germany, she found the most powerful patron of all, Adolf Hitler. Bach carefully reconstructs their relationship (he does not believe the two were ever sexually involved) and shows her varied relations with other Nazi notables (Goebbels, Speer, Bormann). Bach looks with a filmmaker’s eye at Riefenstahl’s great popular successes (Triumph of the Will, Olympia), as well as her lesser known and aborted films (Tiefland, Black Cargo). He skips quickly over her later years—her books of African photographs, her underwater film (he calls Underwater Impressions “soporific”). On his subject’s considerable moral failings, Bach is unrelenting. She knew she was in the presence of evil; she found it attractive—and lucrative.
A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a closer look at the clouds.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40400-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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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