An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show...
Funny-faced girl makes good: the extraordinary career of Kay Thompson (1909–1998).
Hollywood director and producer Irvin presents the life of Thompson with vigor and dash befitting his larger-than-life subject. She was a singer, songwriter, arranger, vocal coach and author, best remembered today for her Eloise children’s-book series, an iconic performance in Funny Face (1957) and as the godmother and muse of Liza Minnelli. Born Catherine Fink in modest circumstances in St. Louis, Mo., the precociously talented Thompson wasted little time shedding her Midwestern roots and taking her rightful place in the world of show business, forging a successful career singing on the radio before winding up at M-G-M as the studio’s in-house vocal arranger and coach. From the start, Thompson was too intelligent, too iconoclastic, too demanding…too much, and her wildly innovative artistry and eccentric hauteur prevented her from ever truly breaking through to a mass audience. However, those traits endeared her to Hollywood royalty and made acolytes of the likes of Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra, all of whom were coached by Thompson. Irvin charts Thompson’s dizzying successes (a nightclub act with the Williams Brothers that broke attendance records and convulsed audiences to the point of hysteria) and crushing failures (a control freak and egomaniac, Thompson repeatedly shot herself in the foot, turning down offers or leaving projects that failed to meet her impossible standards) with rollicking humor and infectious enthusiasm. The story of Thompson’s Eloise franchise—the author had honed the character since childhood, and frequently startled peers by lapsing into the moppet’s inimitable patois—is as fascinating as her performing career, and equally frustrating, as her abominable treatment of her collaborator, illustrator Hilary Knight (Thompson’s need for sole credit bordered on the pathological), casts a bit of a pall over those effervescent little tomes.
An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show business.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7653-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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