Bears out the suspicion that Richard Stirling’s unrevealing Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography (2008) faithfully reflects...
Closing on the eve of her Oscar-winning film debut in Mary Poppins, Andrews’s memoir focuses on a young and, in most respects, rather ordinary girl with a complicated home life and a freakishly precocious larynx.
Christened Julia Wells, the author writes evocatively of her youth in bomb-ravaged London, and of accompanying her musical mother and stepfather (the source of her current surname) as they worked the punishing music-hall circuit, dogged by alcoholism and precarious finances. Prepubescent Julie, with her strikingly mature coloratura, eventually became the act’s star attraction and the family’s chief breadwinner. All this is clearly and elegantly presented—Andrews’s limpid prose style has earned her considerable success as an author of children’s books—but curiously muted, as she admits to generic feelings of sadness or stress but declines to further explicate her inner life. It remains unclear whether this is simply the evidence of a fundamentally reserved personality, or if Andrews lacks the complexity usually associated with artists of her accomplishments. Her oddly bloodless accounts of her relationships with her feckless, selfish mother, overbearing, mildly predatory stepfather and loyal first husband offer few clues. Andrews conveys real feeling only when discussing her beloved father, Ted Wells, a gentle teacher and nature lover whose simple enjoyment of hearth, home and the natural world seems central to her cozy worldview. The latter half of the narrative is manna for musical-theater buffs: Writing about her phenomenal Broadway successes in My Fair Lady and Camelot, Andrews provides entertaining gossip about Rex Harrison, Richard Burton, Lerner and Loewe, and Moss Hart, as well as insightful, informative analysis of the technical aspects of her craft.
Bears out the suspicion that Richard Stirling’s unrevealing Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography (2008) faithfully reflects its subject’s personality.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7868-6565-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
