5 comments about Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography.

1. I was very disappointed with this book. It seems to be a reiteration of Quirk's previous book, an encyclopedia of Crawford's movies. As noted by other reviewers, the majority of the book's content is the chronology of movie work, with scant references to her personal life.
   
   Although the content was lacking, it was the questioning of the author's credibility that lessened my enjoyment of the book. Quirk uses this medium to post catty remarks about those who held negative opinions of Crawford, making vague excuses for her based upon solely his opinion, rather than researched fact. His constant degradation of Christina Crawford, building throughout the book to the climactic last chapter where he revels in her being cut from Crawford's will, builds no sympathy for Crawford, but instead disgust at the non-professional mien that Quirk assembles for himself. In addition, Quirk's treatment of his relationship with Crawford is quite strange, almost to distraction. He refers to himself in the third person, but uses both his given name (Lawrence) and his nickname (Larry) refer to himself. He does this also when referencing his father, journalist James (Jimmy) Quirk. It's this disjointed prevalence of opinion amidst a feigned "disengaged" appearance that makes the reader wonder a.) was this book even edited for continuity before printing? and also b.) what did Quirk want to achieve in writing this?
   
   I recommend this book for Crawford fans who want to read up on everything Crawford, but not for those wanting researched, factual information or even for those just wanting an interesting jaunt into the life of a screen legend.



2. Given Joan Crawford's active love life, up-and-down stardom and the occasional classic movie, one would expect that a really good, entertaining biography could be written about her.
   
   Well, this isn't it. Lawrence J. Quirk and William Schoell trip over their own feet, as they desperately try to convince the reading public that Crawford was some kind of Hollywood saint. "Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography" is less interested in Crawford's actual life, than in worshiping at her altar.
   
   Crawford was born to an impoverished family, who rejected her at a young age when she was caught sleeping with her stepfather. She veered off into showbiz, becoming a notable starlet and marrying into Hollywood royalty. She also survived the transition from silent movies to talkies, which most stars didn't.
   
   As as her marriages failed, she continued notching famous lovers (including Clark Gable) on her bedpost, as she rapidly ascended to megastardom. Even into old age, she continued making intriguing (and sometimes wretched) movies, and adopted four children to provide her with unconditional love.
   
   Courtesy of her daughter Christina Crawford, there's still a lot of confusion about what kind of person Joan Crawford really was, especially since so many accounts differ. Was she really a mentally-ill harpy? Was she an essentially nice if needy person? Or was she an arrogant master of PR?
   
   Sadly, "The Essential Biography" won't tell you. Quirk and Schoell dismiss all negative rumors about Crawford, because... well, because they're negative. Instead, Crawford is painted as a supersaint -- a perfect mother, the best actress ever, always classy, intelligent, and with high standards (but heaven forbid she be a snob). All her performances were flawless.
   
   And if she ever did anything wrong... well, it was ALWAYS someone else's fault. If anyone criticized her, they are dismissed as has-beens and ingrates. If a director criticized her professionally, then he is basically called a hack. Other actors -- especially the legendary Bette Davis -- are thoroughly roasted, while Joan's own catty remarks and personal problems -- alcoholism, OCD, and sleeping with her stepdad -- are ignored.
   
   In fact, it's completely impossible to find a moment of honesty in here. Schoell and Quirk are so hell-bent on painting Crawford as a sexual plaster saint that objectivity is thrown out the window. No new information is provided, except the authors' gushing recountings of long-ago interviews.
   
   Fortunately the book is well-written, and has some lovely career photographs of some of Joan's best movies, as well as detailed plot descriptions of most of the better-known films, as well as the obscure ones (like "Our Dancing Daughters"). But after a hundred or so pages, the constant worship of Crawford becomes wearying.
   
   "Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography" will be a good read for those who already think that Crawford can do no wrong. For the rest of us, it's just a 270-page recounting of two men's megacrushes. Nauseating.



3. This is the worst biography ive ever had the misfortune of reading.It provides no real insight into Joans character and is loaded(too much ) with detailed plot summaries and key scenes of ALL HER MOVIES(over 70).A brief plot symnopsis and maybe a note of key scenes of her LANDMARK MOVIES instead of all her movies would of been appropiate.There's no sense of actually getting deeper into Joan Crawford as a person.All it was was she drank out her fith of vodlka(100th proof) and carried on a affair with so and so then a LOOONG summary of her next film.



4. If you are looking for an in-depth biography on Joan Crawford's life and that alone, this book is not for you. Rather than rehashing her life's story, as has been reported in several other books, the authors of this book made this more of a filmography - - dissecting Crawford's movies and the stages in her personal and professional lives when she made them.
   I considered it fascinating reading - - starting with her early silent movie roles, as Lucille LeSueur, to her breakout role as Diana in Our Dancing Daughters, to her many shopgirl roles at MGM. During this period, the authors point out that Crawford herself was first living her "fairy tale" marriage to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Her roles shifted slightly with the disintegration of that marriage, and her subsequent marriage to Franchot Tone, a more "serious" stage and film actor. MGM's reluctance to put her in serious roles, led her to the title of Box Office Poison and to the Warner's lot, where her "women's movies" coincided with the landmark of her fourth decade. As she aged, her films became more serious, more dramatic, more "female in trouble", until she fell into the horror movie cycle, a fate shared with Bette Davis.
   For the most part, I thought this was a fascinating look at the incomparable Crawford. Nothing too earth shattering revealed here. Just a fresh, new look at her movies and the timing with which they were made.
   A bonus for Crawford fans.



5. this book in my opinion is trash, i read a couple chapters and i had to wash my eyes, alot of un-truths here, the "author" claims that crawford walked in on bette davis perfoming fellatio on her husband franchot tone??? disgusting- avoid this lying filth!

5 comments about Saint Therese of Lisieux (Penguin Lives).

1. "Saint Therese of Lisieux" is a short story of a short life. Drawn largely from Therese's own writings and the recollections and testimony of acquaintances, it provides an up close view of a holy life.
   
   Therese is a saint who pursued sanctity by seeking "nothingness" within the Carmel of Lisieux and yet became the patroness of missionaries and one of the most popular saints of the past century.
   
   This book provides an introduction to the spiritual life of late 19th Century France, in which religious life was at its greatest popularity, and the particular environment of her convent. It also gives an insight into the attraction of Therese to the world since her death. I find the popularity of Therese and St. Francis of Assisi to be puzzling. Our world generally esteems those who give their lives in service to others, not in those who seek self mortification as their road to salvation, but in their cases, this is the model which the world embraces. The book alludes to Therese's writings, but really does not, in my estimation, make the case for her immense popularity. This book is a good introduction to her life, but I am left searching for her charism.



2. Harrison shows us a Therese who often wept but who also had a gift for restraining her emotions; who's self-understanding was influenced by her dreams, even while she discounted the value of dreams; who had an unusual preadolescent disorder involving involuntary muscular movements which sometimes even threw her out of her bed; and who longed for purgation by spiritual fire. And Harrison did it with literary flair. I loved it. Now I'm reading The Kiss.



3. Kathryn Harrison writes triumphantly about Therese Martin the Saint of Lisieux. Her biography captures the historical character from childhood to her death at age 24 years. Harrison portrays the life of Therese amidst the context of the late 19th Century. The focus of the book is on the family life and the convent life of Therese and her seemingly constant struggle to rest in perfect devotion to God to whom she had sacrificed her life.
   
   Harrison writes exquisitely of Therese, but she writes at times from a freudian, humanistic point of view, somehow missing or misunderstanding the mysticism of Therese's life that is the one characteristic that makes her life remarkable. I think this comes from the writer discounting the reality of Therese's constant communion with God.
   
   I recommend this book because it illustrates the power of a quiet life lived in the love and service of God. Harrison successfully shows the effect of one life lived fully for God unselfishly and sacrificially. The final pages offer a brief glimpse of the enormous impact Therese has had on people since the time immediately following her death.
   
   Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare's Plays



4. Unfortunately this was the only biography of Therese in my local public library. All biographies are to some extent seeing the subject thru a lens, but this lens filters out much of what is of the most value in Therese's writings in my opinion. This biographer seems unable to dive into or convey much of Therese's spirituality, due to a lack of understanding or excessive skepticism of spiritual experience. Biographer doesn't seem to be convinced that spiritual experiences are real. She continuously suggests that Therese's spirituality may be just neuroses and offers up superficial pop-psychological comments for every spiritual experience. Its like a biography of a mountaineer but the biographer is not at all sure that mountains really even exist at all, and they may be a figment of the fevered imagination. Biographer thinks this point of view is attuned to what "contemporary readers" expect but it just ends up missing most of whats there spiritually.



5. I have not read any of the poems or the autobiography that Saint Therese is known for; I was drawn to this book because I had heard of her and wanted to learn more about her. This shorter biography seemed the best route in that regard and Kathryn Harrison does a commendable job of introducting Therese to readers who may not be familiar with this saint.
   
   Harrison begins her biography with a look at Therese's parents and the role their failing and success played in Therese's life. She would lose her mother at a young age, and constantly look for mother figures in her sisters, the Virgin Mary and any visions she experienced. Harrison weaves the saint's poetry and writings throughout the piece, offering insight and expansion when needed. After her death, Therese Martin quickly became a very influential religious figure. Having received a special dispensation from Pope Leo XIII, Therese Martin was able to enter the convent at Carmel at the age of fifteen. She had always dedicated her life to the Lord and would not allow anyone to hold her back, even the Mother Superior. Her older sisters were nuns in the same order, springing from a religious family that predestined their daughters' lives for this role. Therese recorded her life in the convent and wrote poems and plays that inspire readers to this day. She was misunderstood perhaps by her fellow sisters because she longed for a nothingness in her faith that only God could grant.
   
   When her tuberculosis progressed, her sisters took to recording conversations with her for posterity, which were used in her beatification. She died at the age of twenty-four and she received the fastest canonization in the history of the Catholic church.
   
   Other reviewers have mentioned that this book misses the point, but I disagree. In offering some of the so-called Freudian analysis of Therese and her writings, the author is not diminishing their content or ardor; she merely mentions that these comparisons can be made, and it is up to the reader to decide how they interpret these writings. There is throughout Therese's life the knowledge that she wanted nothing more than to be a nun and to become a saint; so there are naturally instances when she almost seems to be posturing, knowing how she acted then would forever be remembered and critiqued if her desire was to be granted. And readers should not forget that when a woman takes a vow to become a nun, that their husband is Christ Jesus and the ceremony is a wedding of sorts; any language that the author has used to express this relationship paints it as a union of Saint Therese's soul with the Holy Spirit.

No comments about Completing the Circle (North American Indian Prose Award).

3 comments about My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back.

1. Mary is taking you to the Stalin era... in imagination I lived her life while reading the book..When I went to Moscow it felt as if I have already been there.



2. A great account of how people lived in the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule. The advantage of this book is that it gives you the facts in such a way that it is up to you to decide whether or not the author is right in her conclusions. I strongly recommend this book for both academic and private reading for I believe it is one of the most unique books ever written about the lifes of regular Soviet citizens.



3. Although I have read a number of books on the Soviet Union, much to my surprise, I found myself totally absorbed by Mary Leder's odyssey. Starting with her travels across the US, and thence to Birobidzhan (Siberia), later asked to spy and, of course, spied upon, I believe Ms. Leder spins an eloquent and gripping tale. From Mary the dedicated communist to Mary the disenchanted one, from Mary the factory worker to Mary the editor-translator, she paints a totally honest and courageous picture of herself and her travails and those of so many of her fellow citizens. I recommend this book highly.

No comments about Lillian Wald: A Biography.

2 comments about Flying Grounded: My Spiritual Triumph Over Female Bullying.

1. I just started reading this books last night, and I can't put it down. The story is brutal and honest, and an inspiration for women and girls who are trying to heal from horrible high school events. I do recommend this book.



2. The author has put her heart and soul into this book, allowing you the reader relive her tumultuous youthful years. She does a wonderful job of conveying to you how much hurt and angst a person can go through when being bullied. As a female who has been through this same situation, I can wholeheartedly relate to the authors story. She shows that it is possible through the love and support of family and friends and with
   God's help, becoming a better and stronger person is possible. You can in fact become a much stronger person.

No comments about A Life Well Led: The Biography of Barbara Freire-Marreco Aitken, British Anthropologist.

1 comments about Brigitte Bardot: "And God Created Woman".

1. This is an excellent book. Pics are great. Magazine covers, film photos, the works.

5 comments about Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman.

1. The author not only spent the time to do a very well researched, insightful book about The Travelling Community and Nan in particular, but she managed to bring Nan to life with her own words as well as the author's observations. Nan becomes as haunting a presence as her photograph on the cover promises. Somehow Sharon Gmelch managed to be both personal AND objective in her telling of Nan's life.



2. A very interesting and heartrending book. While as an Irish person I regularly saw Tinkers, as they were called, their lives were somewhat remote from mine. Through this book, and Nan's experience, I was taken into the heart of their lives and and was able to view with compassion their struggle to survive. In the days when villages were isolated, they provided a needed service to communities such as sweeping chimneys. However, with modern communications, the Tinker's services and wares were no longer needed. They gravitated to the cities in search of work and became scrap merchants, fortune tellers, and beggers, becoming a nuisance to residents, and they were largely ostricized. Yet, while the older Travelling People yearn for the open skies and freedom from the confines of the cities and a settled life, but this is no longer a viable lifestyle. Nan preferred her children to have a settled life.



3. Sharon Gmelch's work, published originally in 1986, emerged from her anthropological doctoral studies conducted along with her husband George's concurrent work into the urbanisation of the travellers. She enters Nan's tales delicately, bringing you as a reader in and out of Nan's anecdotes occasionally before taking again the thread of her long and detailed recollections of a life spent largely outside the confines of city life, but, it is to be noted, increasingly becoming settled within the urban life that takes over for millions of Irish in the latter part of the 20th c., from whatever rural background or tradition.
   
   The highlights of this account I found were in her service for Major Evans at Gretton House in Northants. In this quintessentially British country home, she worked her way up from being a kitchen maid, and her vignettes capture movingly her ability to, being illiterate, to live by her wits. Her subsequent return to Ireland, one senses, was not wished for, even though it brought her back to her traveller lifestyle. For her childhood, as with too many of her own 18 children, she shows how elastic the bonds are between parents and offspring (despite the often asserted claim that for travellers family ties come first), as some of her own children found themselves sent off to institutions to be raised.
   
   The most intriguing section next was how she met her match in trying to survive as a totally untutored fortune-teller in 1940s Conamara, since she could only barter her wares rather than be paid for them from women as poor as she was! After that, the weariness of surviving wears her down into a much older-looking woman than she was when Gmelch met her in the 1970s. Abusive husbands, unending pregnancies, exhausting hustles, and life spent on the road or in substandard housing left her wiped out.
   Drink and violence--at one point she casually gives as an aside the fact her husband broke her nose--belie the carefree proto-hippie romanticism that rose-tinted a harsh, gray, and lonely life. (No index and a lack of detailed notes cut this book down a star, however).
   
   A good follow-up is Gmelch's 1976 general account, Tinkers and Travellers, which documents Nan's testimony and that of others, often camped at Holylands near Dublin. George Gmelch wrote a more theoretical, less engaging study of the Travellers, and Jane Helleiner offers more recent scholarly work from 2001.



4. I have used this book several times in anthropology classes I teach and this coming fall I am going to use it again. I think of it as a classic because it addresses so many important aspects of a good life history. First, it represents the everyday life of a person living in poverty, an area worthy of academic study. It is also a close study of how women are sometimes, and in some societal situations, subject to abuse and have little recourse. Then, this study is also an interesting look at how historical changes influence the lives of people, in this case the travellers who used to make their living as tin smiths and horse traders and are now forced to adapt to an urban and highly technical world. The book is beautifully written and has always been well received by students



5. This books gives an excellent insight in the life-style of the Irish travellers, as well as it is an enjoyable read. The main character, Nan, is a woman from a travelling family, living like nomads in the developping Ireland that is becoming more and more modern around them. Her life is very harsh, and harsher than the normal life of a travelling person, as the author points out. Nonetheless, or maybe just because of that, it is a gripping story and its contains are very interesting. You don't only get a good read, you also get a good and interesting lesson in the subsociety of the Irish travellers, a group that to a large extent maintains their nomadic lifestyle up to this day.

5 comments about The Bear's Embrace: A Story of Survival.

1. This book was written very well, I could feel the authors pain and suffering. The book mentions a documentary TV program that is about this incident--but I haven't been able to track it down.



2. The knee-jerk reviews that call this an 'inspirational', 'you can overcome anything' memoir are unbelievably obtuse. The unexpurgated, NC-17 truth of the matter is that the author committed suicide shortly after the publication of this book, apparently overcome by the enormity of what had happened to her and what was taken away from her by this horrible encounter with a bear. I felt that the end of the book, with its strenuous and somewhat fake-seeming efforts to find a 'silver lining' in her misfortune were perhaps the result of pressure from the editor/publisher to end the story in an upbeat way. The bottom line in the publishing biz is that downers don't sell. Sorry, all you 'smile button' types: sometimes the unvarnished truth is that you cannot turn the page, because the page weights a ton.



3. This is a deeply moving story about surviving---not just a brutal bear attack, but the facial disfigurement, long-term pain and surgeries, and the deep depression caused by no one understanding Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, 20 years ago. As someone who lived in Canada for 20 years, I believe that Patricia's critique of her medical care is NOT a critique of the Canadian system of health care funding, but of how little was understood back then about trauma, and how to rebuild one's life after such horror. This is a deeply spiritual book, in spite of its graphic descriptions of her facial damage, and the clumsy surgical attepts to fix it. This book should be required reading for all people in the health care and mental health fields. It might teach compassion for "difficult" patients, who have much to teach us.



4. I believe that this story was a great description of a persons will and determination to survive. The book is very well explained and tells a lot about the human spirit. It is something that you would read on a rainy Saturday afternoon with a cup of hot cocoa or a hot cup of coffee whatever you prefer. A great read indeed.



5. I read the book in one sitting. I simply could not put it down no matter how many pressing/important things I needed to do. It has stayed with me long after, as well. This book was not what I expected. After chapter two which was the attack and rescue I wondered how the author could fill the rest of the book with the recovery. In moving prose, with bare honesty, she takes us on her harrowing journey. Through it all is her Homeric husband(demanding work, chronically ill/incapacitated wife, growing needy children AND building his own home - whom we come to love and admire, too). Yes, this story is an unwitting condemnation of the Canadian socialized quality of medicine, but it is ultimately the strength and perseverance of the human spirit. Please continue to write, we readers have come to care for you and your family deeply.