Great actress, mediocre memoir.
Dench recalls her illustrious career in this rather flavorless memoir, tracking her storied performances in a staggering number of classical and contemporary stage works, TV series and films.
The author writes with a restraint that borders on the perverse, eschewing backstage gossip or personal introspection—or really much sentiment at all. She recounts a few mild pranks and standard actors’ complaints about less-than-ideal performance conditions, but most of the narrative just tallies up professional accomplishments, charting Dench’s relatively smooth ascension from respected repertory actress to Academy Award winner. With a few blandly complimentary phrases, she sums up co-stars such as Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, declining to discuss the differing processes of mounting films, TV series and stage shows, or her impressions of the differing performance cultures of Hollywood, Broadway and the English theater. Her English TV series As Time Goes By enjoys a devoted cult in the United States, but she has almost nothing to say about it beyond registering bemusement at the Internet-driven mania of its fan base. Dench was married to actor Michael Williams for nearly three decades and had a daughter with him, but he’s a vague, reassuring presence in the narrative whose death from cancer receives a rather cursory treatment here. The author’s English reserve is admirable, but the brisk manner in which she recounts the presumably central tragedy of her life points up the book’s ultimately off-putting coolness and perfunctory approach to autobiography. It’s more of a list than a story, and indeed the book’s most impressive section is a simple listing of Dench’s acting credits, limning a truly awesome body of work. Bits of her personality do peek through, chiefly a surprising tetchiness (she is not a great fan of journalists) that might have made the book more enjoyable if given free rein.
Great actress, mediocre memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65906-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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