1 comments about Dickie Bird: His Autobiography.

1. Having been a cricket fan since the black & white days, I found Dickie's story to be most sincere in its writings, which in essence is how Dickie Bird "ran" the games for which he was in charge. A most interesting read for the diehard cricket fan, though don't expect a masterpiece.

2 comments about Debbie: My Life/2 Audio Cassettes.

1. Debbie brings you right into her life. You are there with her every step of the way. I have read the book and listened to the tapes several times and enjoy it each time.



2. i just listened to this audio book ......what a pure pleasure! debbie has a knack of drawing you vivid pictures ..with her words..of just how it is to live her life......the hours pass in no time as you listen to her story..of her life with her family, career, loves and losses...she is a joy to listen to......once again i say BRAVO DEBBIE.

No comments about The World's 100 Greatest People (The Inteliquest Historical Biography Series, Volume One).

5 comments about The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.

1. I have to disagree with those who trash this book. I've read it more than once, and find it quite good. The amateur psychoanalysis doesn't dominate the proceedings, while you do get a very well written overview of an enormous career. Readability counts! - most Hitch books are boring junk, based on some dire Lacanian theory or whatnot. Okay, so Spoto feels he must "explain" Hitch's often morbid sensibility - if you notice, Spoto is also very interested in Christian subject matter. Possibly he feels there is something naughty about Hitch flicks, and must apologize for/excuse his interest in this way. (Speaking of amateur psych...) But that wouldn't be reason enough to pan the book. It's a compelling read, and much of it seems to be accurate. I believe its trashy rep is overstated. Read it, you'll probably be won over.



2. Nearly 25 years later Donald Spoto's book on Hitchcock, which caused sch a stir when it appeared, is still the champ. You could read it for its salacious details, such as the real reason he wanted Madeleine Carroll in handcuffs. Or you could read it to see him organize Hitchcock's different films into categories, classifying them not only by way of theme but with reference to studio politics. Think of how different Hitchcock's "Warners" films are than his Selznick pictures, even with the understanding that the same auteur created them.
   
   Spoto is unable to make out what was really going through Hitchcock's head while making VERTIGO. Did he really want the insipid Vera Miles to play the part(s) of Judy and Madeline, and then grow impatient with Kim Novak largely because she was no Vera Miles (thank goodness). If he was so furious with Miles, why did he then cast her in THE WRONG MAN, where she's so dreadfully bland one forgets she's in the picture? (And later he used her in his longrunning TV series.) If, as Spoto says, Hitchcock had an erotic fetish for blondes, did it somehow turn itself off when confronted with Kim Novak, one of the most obsessable women in film? I don't believe it!
   
   However Spoto is spot on when it comes to Hitchcock's last passion, for the actress "Tippi" Hedren with whom he made his two best films. Another reviewer here dismisses Ms. Hedren as a "mediocre performer at best who should have been grateful for a great man's attention and adoration," but under Hitchcock's skilled direction, she was able to pull off quite capably two of the most intense and primal roles ever created in the American cinema. People might have been startled by her work at the time, but it just keeps looking better and better where some of the other performances he elicited aren't looking that good any more, for he could make good actors look bad (Olivier, Fonda, Clift, Paul Newman, etc)--like the cattle he thought of them as.
   
   Our views of Hitchcock will continue to evolve, but we will always be grateful to Donald Spoto for expressing a certain biographical turn with great elegance and, almost, wit.



3. Of course, in 2005 we're accustomed to knowing a lot more about celebrities than we really ought to. When this book was first published twenty years ago, this fixation had not quite gotten to where it is today.
   
   No - instead, on the heels of Spoto's "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock," which gave Spoto free access to the late director and to his archives, Spoto insists that knowing way too much information about Hitch's private life is essential, somehow, to understanding his art.
   
   To a certain extent, that's the case. But some of this stuff is simply gratiutous. How relevant to art is the "Marnie" incident with Tippi Hedren? What possible addition to an important body of knowledge does that story make?
   
   If you want gossip, it's here. If you want to gain some insight into our greatest director's artistic character, it's promised here but maybe not delivered.



4. "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
   
   ...and here is the Master of Suspense. While Hitchcock happens to be one of the better-known directors of the 20th century, he surely is the only master of enigma. Spoto has done an admirable job in depicting the life of a man always shrouded in mystery.
   
   The book follows Hitch from his childhood. A rather unattractive mother's boy, he was an outcast at public school. It continues his story from humble beginnings, through the discovery of genius, and ends at his death in 1980, at the age of 81. Throughout the pages, Spoto covers Hitchcock's life in detail, including his many quirks, obsessions bizarre sense of humour.
   
   Hitchcock's life was indeed bizarre - his personality and obsessions manifesting themselves in his over-eating and his dry, often macabre sense of humour. However, as the author rightly points out, the director also revealed this side of himself through the images of his movies. This makes a fascinating study once you have read the book and you'll never view Hitch's films at face value again.
   
   Because of her desire to protect her father's privacy, Hitch's daughter, Pat, refused Spoto any assistance in the writing of this book. He went instead to a veritable legion of actors and screenwriters who knew him and worked with him. The result is an extremely revealing and often very dark portrait of a man whose character was as shadowed as his films.
   
   But not all is dark and foreboding. There are several amusing anecdotes, which highlight Hitch's macabre sense of humour. Like the time he had a dummy made in his own likeness and sent it floating on its back down the Thames river as a publicity stunt for his movie "Frenzy" in 1972.
   
   My own personal favourite is the story of a woman who accosted him and complained that the "Psycho" shower scene so frightened her daughter that the girl would no longer shower. His laconic reply was, "Then, Madam, I suggest you have her dry cleaned."
   
   He also did not suffer actors gladly. While he did have his stable of favourites that he worked with, he once claimed that actors were cattle. Later he said, "I didn't say that actors are cattle - I said they should be treated as cattle." Another story says that when an actress asked Hitchcock if her right or left profile was better, he told her, "My dear, you're sitting on your best profile."
   
   Some of Spoto's claims I can't help but treat with a little scepticism. I do know that Hitch had a fascination with murder but the tender way in which he presents it in his films is classic Hitchcock. However, the author's statement that scenes in Hitch's movies reflect kind of voyeurism, I feel that with his trademark camera pans through windows, the director was trying to give the audience a bird's eye view of the scene - no more and no less. It is his way of allowing us to enter the private lives of his characters.
   
   When all is said and done, this is a fascinating book of a fascinating man. A genius in his own time, but also a frustrated enigma, with a taste for the truly macabre. I highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in learning about the man behind the mystery, although it is a little heavy at times.
   
   I'll leave the last word to the Master of Suspense himself:
   
   "Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.



5. Donald Spoto has done a tremendous work in obtaining first-hand accounts from Hitchcock's friends, colleagues, family, and even Alfred, himself. There is not one iota of information about Hitchcock left out of this monumental work.

   He traces the ghosts of psychology that haunted Hitchcock from a very young child on until his pitiful death. Hitch's wants, desires, insecurities, and love affairs (one-sided) are intricately outlined and analyzed in a biography that has few contemporaries. This truly is the ultimate work on Hitchcock's life.

1 comments about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

1. Anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of "The Lion in Winter" cannot help wanting to know more about Eleanor. In addition to her own titles of Queen of France, Queen of England, and heir to the Aquitaine, she gave birth to the rulers of Europe. "Her sons and their descendants were kings of England, her daughters queens of Sicily and Castile; among her grandsons were a Holy Roman Emperor and the kings of Castile and Jerusalem, while her great-grandson became king of France. Two saints, St. Louis IX of France and St. Ferdinand III of Castile, were also among her descendants. Her blood continues to flow in the veins of Queen Elizabeth II."
   
   Despite the book title, Eleanor shares the spotlight with two husbands and 10 progeny, as well as with Becket, Saladin, a variety of Popes, and the Crusades that served little end than to bankrupt whole nations. The book is not easy reading. The writing is more like a historical journal, with every fact about 12th century Europe the author could uncover, but I would have her leae nothing out. One finishes it knowing that Eleanor was a force of nature and Katherine Hepburn truly captured her indomitable spirit. In an era when 50 was a long life, Eleanor lived to the amazing age of 82. The reader is gripped by the knowledge that every step taken by Eleanor and men and women of her time has resonated through time.

5 comments about The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan.

1. I suggest reading this as a cautionary tale: how a man with so much promise, talent and intelligence, saddled with insecurities and a taste for hedonism, left him broke and feeling like a failure at the end of his life. How terribly tragic. But this book is definitely not a downer.
   
   However, knowing that Kenneth Tynan was a British literary critic, I had reservations about delving into this. I thought it could be a very dry read. Instead, it turned out to be laugh out loud funny, with some serious dish about famous people (the man knew EVERYBODY) and at the same time introspective and melancholic. This book is not for everybody, but for those with a love of brilliant prose and serious wit, the rewards are rich. - Susan Sayles



2. From THE DIARIES OF KENNETH TYNAN: "Whenever we solve the problem of dreams, we shall not be far from solving the root problems of human identity and creativity. Has anyone noticed the really inexplicable thing about our nightly narrative tapes? They have suspense. This occurred to me last night, when I was involved in a Hitchcock-type chase dream---in which, I suddenly realised, I did not know what was going to happen next. I did not know who would be lurking behind the next door; and I wanted desperately to know. What part of one's mind is it that harbours secrets unknown even to the unconscious? (For in dreams we are surely privy to the unconscious in full flood.) The theory that in dreams we tap a source of energy outside the individual psyche is powerfully reinforced by the presence of suspense."
   
   After Tynan left his job as dramaturg at the National Theatre, he pretty much floundered around for the rest of his life. I wish he had gone back to doing theater reviews. But I guess he was burned out on theater. Maybe he grew bored with the very medium of theater. He said he was profoundly bored with everything ("I shall die writhing in apathy"), but I'm not too convinced of that claim. I wish he had felt an artistic duty to his audience and had then carried out that duty. While reading this thing, I had an overwhelming urge to slap that cigarette out of his mouth and that hairbrush out of his hand and to sternly command him to "do do that voodoo that you do so well".



3. I remember Kenneth Tynan from an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show shortly before his 1980 death. Until this book, I was unfamiliar with his work. Now I see what I was missing.
   
   Not only was Tynan a highly skilled writer of prose, but as a critic he saw things for what they were, even if the majority disagreed. He gives Warren Beatty's pretentious and mystifyingly overrated film Shampoo the swift kick to the rear that it deserves, and even finds a fault with Paddy Cheyefsky's Network that I had not detected prior to reading his assessment of the film in his diaries. Tynan also has his say on economics ("Inflation rides high and I believe intentionally" he writes in 1973) and a myriad of other subjects including his preoccupation with spanking.
   
   Overall, these diaries reveal a melancholy soul who found some solace in writing about his life and its disappointments in his journal. Most published diaries promise more than they deliver. Not Tynan's. His diaries are a compelling read.



4. Kenneth Tynan was a marvellous journalist. There is no-one writing for magazines or newspapers today (perhaps with the exception of Christopher Hitchens) who can so readily draw upon an apparently limitless well of wit, and do so in perfect sentences. All of his books are worth reading if you can find them second-hand: his early collection of drama criticism, 'Curtains', and the collection 'Profiles', are probably the places to start. For devotees of Tynan, who bemoan the paucity of his output in the last fifteen years of his life, the Diaries, splendidly introduced by John Lahr, can prove very frustrating. It seems everything conspired against Ken sitting in front of the typewriter and working his magic. His health was abysmal -- emphysema worsened by a heavy cigarette habit; he was preoccupied by a strange strain of socialism, which allows him to finish one entry with a call for action on the part of the workers and begin the next with an account of a tour through France, eating at three-star Michelin restaurants all the way; and he was rather excessively waylaid by a spanking-based dalliance with a mistress. That he managed to eke out portions of 'The Sound of Two Hands Clapping' and the profiles collected in 'Show People' is, on the evidence of the diaries, something of a miracle.

   The diaries themselves make for very entertaining reading. There is plenty of celebrity gossip and, as befits writing not meant for public consumption, a good deal of invective. Sir Peter Hall, referred to throughout as 'P. Hall' is dealt with particularly harshly, and the relationship between Laurence Olivier and Tynan is fraught with ambiguity. There is also Tynan's almost comical political naivete; while there is certainly much that can be said for socialism and sexual liberation, Tynan's blatant hypocrisy (there are several references to his employing servants and nannies) and his very middle-class hatred of anything at all tainted by being middle-class, does not make for a convincing advertisement. I can only imagine how awful his 'spanking film', which he spends several years trying to find backers for, would have been. But these are, believe it or not, minor cavils, and actually add to the enjoyment of looking over Tynan's shoulder as he unburdens himself of his daily thoughts. (He certainly does not let himself off lightly, frequently despairing over his lassitude.) And the concluding entries, shadowed as they are by the reader's (and Tynan's) knowledge of his imminent death, are genuinely moving. I trust and hope there is more Tynan to be reissued soon. He's a fine companion.




5. To paraphrase another wit: This is some of the best fun you can have with your clothes still on. Was Kenneth Tynan the most sophisticated and intelligent critic of his generation? It's hard to think that he wasn't, especially after reading these diaries. Not only does he give you a grand notion of what theater can be, but he also gives you a guided tour of the international theater scene in the late twentieth century. What a grand tonic his intellectually sharp viper tongue is in these days of spineless critics. Bravo!

No comments about CRYING WITH LAUGHTER AUDIO BOO.

No comments about Stephen Spielberg : A Biography.

No comments about Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations - Counsel Edward L. Bernays (Newstrack Executive Classics).

No comments about Colin Powell: It Can Be Done (High Five Reading).