Elizabeth Taylor Books

This is not bad, considering it is too small and thin to be truly comprehensive. The author has definite opinions, some I agreed with, others not altogether. But he has an interesting take on things.

There are very good black and white photos of Taylor, some featuring her with actors I like, like Vittorio Gassman, John Ericson, and Spencer Tracy, and of course Montgomery Clift.

If you are looking for a true biography, this does not fill the bill, but it would supplement other books on Taylor nicely.

The strength of this book lies in the many beautiful photographs of Elizabeth Taylor from her childhood to recent times. Many of these images will be familiar, and many will not be. By putting rare images in this collection, the author has significantly enhanced its value. I wish the book had added another 100 photographs to the 100 plus, mostly color, ones here.

The biography is perfectly adequate, but it is too brief to really get into any detail that might expand your knowledge very much beyond what you know already. The best aspects were putting Ms. Taylor's career in perspective. She performed in around 65 films and television movies, a number matched by few actors of her era. She also was one of the few child stars to have an adult film career. Further, she outlived most of the stars she appeared with by many years. Despite ill health and many accidents, she has been the ultimate survivor in the most fickle business we have.

The main story line of the biography is in the transformation of her life and career roles from child, to child actress, to child star, to multiply married person and mother, to adult star, to a celebrity, to an entrepreneur, and then to a social activist for AIDS. Long before Madonna, Ms. Taylor and her advisors were expert at reinventing her in ways that were almost continuously popular with the public.

Today, the world is changing very rapidly and most of us will have many different jobs and careers before we die. After you finish enjoying this book, I urge you to consider what lessons you can draw from Ms. Taylor's career and life that can help you in yours. While many would be thrilled to have some of her fame, few would envy her pain. How came a good balance of life and career be yours? I suggest that you read Anna Quindlen's recent book, A Short Guide to a Happy Life, for more ideas.

Smile, be interesting, be balanced, be careful, and be interested in others!

I am sure you are aware of this - but this is the original title of A Promising Man ... and About Time - or something like that. Fun read.

Elizabeth Taylor, one of those indomitable Victorian women who hiked their skirts and explored where even tough moderns would pause, faced the wilds of northern Canada and of the Faroe Islands. The miserable weather etched the inhabitants but didn't faze our guide.

Taylor was neither a sentimentalist nor a cynic but saw clearly and wrote straight. Trained as an artist and enamored of nature--especially birds and flowers--Taylor appreciated people who lived closest to her beloved surroundings. By her account, they responded to her interest by inviting her to share their hard-bitten lives and without pretense, she accepted their invitations.

Taylor financed her economic travels by writing for middle class magazines, like Frank Leslie's, and for outdoors magazines where a female byline was a rarity. These essays come from those published pieces and some journals archived in her hometown, Minneapolis. A descendent has assembled the collection, but the task had real literary and cultural value that counts for much more than familial duty.

A book about places few of us ever would want to visit became for me a book full of passages worthy of reading to friends. A description of the whale hunt, for example, rings with authority and subdued horror. Elizabeth Taylor emerges as her own modest heroine, and her quiet, gemhard descriptions stay alive long after the book is finished.

This book is a portrait of the lives and times of five of the biggest stars of the 1950's- Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Monty Clift and James Dean. As well as the long extinct HollyWood Studio system that played a large role in helping to create almost all of them. (James Dean as everyone knows pretty much created his own image in defiance of the system.}
There may not be much new information in this book, but some of it was based on personal interviews and correspondence. Once such correspondence was with Elizabeth Taylor as late as 1988.(The first Edition of the book came out in 1989)
The book is definitely worth reading. It is well researched and I liked the way the writer was able to condense the tumultuous events of 5 lives and the books time span of 40 years or so into
297 pages without taking any of the depth away from the extraordinary lives of these remarkable people.

This year marks the 217th anniversary of the beginning of the Great French Revolution with storming of the Bastille on July 14th. An old Chinese Communist leader, the late Zhou Enlai, was once asked by a reporter to sum up the important lessons of the French Revolution. In reply he answered that it was too early to tell what those lessons might be. Whether that particular story is true or not it does contain one important truth. Militants today at the beginning of the 21st century can still profit from reading the history of that revolution.

Professor Lefebvre's two volume account of that revolution is still a good place to start. Although scholarship on various aspects of the French Revolution has mushroomed since his books first appeared, especially around the time of the 200th anniversary of the revolution, most of that work has been very specialized. After over 40 years these volumes still set the standard for a general overview of the convulsions of French and European society before the rise of the Napoleonic period.

The French Revolution, like its predecessor the American Revolution, is covered with so much banal ceremony, flag- waving, unthinking sunshine patriotism and hubris it is hard to see the forest for the trees. The Bastille action while symbolically interesting is not where the real action took place nor was it politically the most significant event. For militants that comes much later with the rise of the revolutionary tribunals and the Committee of Public Safety under the leadership of the left Jacobins Robespierre and Saint Just. Their overthrow in 1794 by more moderate members of their own party, in what is known as the Thermidorian reaction, stopped the forward progression of the revolution although it did not return it back to the old feudal society. The forces unleashed by the revolution, especially among the land hungry peasantry, made that virtually impossible. In short, as has happened before in revolutionary history, the people and programs which supported the forward advancement of the revolution ran out of steam. The careerists, opportunists and those previously standing on the sidelines took control until they too ran out of steam. Not for the first or last time, the precarious balance of the different forces in society clashed and called out for a strongman. Napoleon was more than willing to be obliging when that time came.

The values of the Enlightenment- the believe that human beings can more or less rationally order the way they organize society in the interest of social justice and human dignity, are under extreme attack today. These Enlightenment values are reflected in the successes and failures of the French revolution. So what can militants of the 21st century gather from those tumultuous experiences as we try to extend the gains of that revolution and defend Enlightenment values against the `bully boys and girls' of this world? The most obvious is that the very fact of the French revolution changed the whole nature of political discourse by the creation of a civil society. Today, that task may seem of little importance. However, at the time the vast majority of the population was treated by the old regime as a brute, silent herd. And was suppose to like it, to boot! Seem familiar.

The French Revolution also highlights the need to defend the revolution against both active internal counterrevolutionary elements of the old regime and foreign powers opposed to the new order, the new way of doing business in society. This necessity also occurred previously in the English revolution where continental powers allied with segments of the old royal establishment tried to use Ireland and Scotland as bases to return the Stuarts. Later, in the Russian revolution that same phenomenon occurred with the White Guards and a seemingly world-wide array of hostile powers. In short, the old order will not give up without a fight. We should have that lesson etched in our brains.

Probably the greatest service that Professor Lefebvre provides in his volumes is to encourage an understanding of the above-mentioned relationship of forces. That is, the policies of the various post-1989 governments in reaction to the various forces in Europe, particularly but not exclusively the British, that most certainly were trying overthrow the revolution and either return to the previous status quo or make France a subordinate client state. In fact, this writer argues that one cannot understand French domestic governmental policy in this period without an understanding of that interconnectedness. The various revolutionary governmental forms, culminating with the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre, were increasingly charged with defense of the revolution by putting France on a multi-front war footing. That meant both raising troops, one way or another, and assuring the support of the sans-culottes and small peasant landowners by appropriate measures. Whether those governments did that well or poorly is up to the reader to decide. In any case, thanks Professor Lefebvre.

This book is suitable for first steps in image processing. It is definitely a good thing that morphological operations are introduced without mathematical proofs and theorems. The enclosed software ImageJ is handy to understand the effects of certain image processing operations and to enhance interesting details in an image. For a developper of image processing algorithms this book alone would be too short, though.

The author is a judge for the American Rose Society and is an expert on growing miniature roses. The information included here is thorough and covers the following asepcts of growing these roses -

*An entertaining history of the rose
*A botany lesson (way more than I needed to know!)
*How to select the best varieties
*Growing outdoors
*Growing indoors
*What to do about diseases and pests
*Winter Protection and Care
*Eshibiting roses
*Photographing roses
*Hybridizing roses
*Drying roses
*Arranging roses
*A plug for the American Rose Society

Not included are profiles of individual roses (there are probably way too many anyway) or anything on landscaping with miniatures. The information that is included is thorough and well written. The $17.95 retail price seems high for such a small book but this could be because it is published by a small publishing house. The information contained in it though will be very valuable and useful for gardeners seeking information on how to grow these little charmers.

I didn't know much about Elizabeth Taylor before I read this book, but I am a fan now. Other reviewers have criticized this book for repeating information found in other Taylor sources, and I can't comment on that. As a read...this book is a little tedious. I purchased it from the bargain book rack at Borders. I probably wouldn't have read it otherwise, but I'm glad to know more about such a fascinating American icon.

Elizabeth "Don't Call Her Liz" Taylor has had such a crazy life, punctuated by frequent illnesses (at one point, the author provides a list of the health crises she'd suffered -- and it's a long one -- before she'd even turned thirty) and marriages and divorces and scandals and weight gains and weight losses and multiple trips to rehab, that it is easy to overlook what a great actress she was. Of course, many of her movies were lousy, but even in a turkey like "Butterfield 8" (which Taylor herself detested and only did because she was forced to), she gave a terrific performance.

Oh, and she was beautiful too. Very beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that had she not already established herself as a fine actress from childhood, she may have been dismissed as purely ornamental. No one has had a face like Taylor's -- the sable hair, the flawless skin, the perfectly-formed lips, the incredible eyes (not violet, as legend has it, but a luminous blue, surrounded by, as is revealed in the book, a double set of eyelashes), and as if all that wasn't enough, she had a stunning hourglass figure.

Yet, she has never been fixated on her own looks; her mother Sara is quoted as saying, "She has no idea how beautiful she is," and though that's commonly said about beautiful people, I'm inclined to believe that it is true in Taylor's case. This book doesn't shy away from showing Taylor's flaws -- basically, she's monstrously spoiled, selfish, childish, tantrum-prone, and sometimes downright nightmarish -- but vanity is not one of them.

This biography has many surprisingly touching moments which help balance out some of the more appalling scenes. Sometimes she was such a pill that it's hard to fathom why anyone put up with her. But it's clear that she met her match in Richard Burton, who was just as much of a pill as she was. Burton was perhaps the only person who had no qualms whatsoever about insulting Taylor to her face, and he really could be cruel. Given the knock-down drag-out fights they had in public, it is more than a little scary to imagine what their private fights were like.

In sum: this book doesn't contain any earthshattering revelations, although it does have some rare photographs, such as one of Taylor's mother Sara during her brief spate as an actress. However, it is written with great affection and respect, and it is a fascinating story.

A fascinating book! Very well researched and written by Taraborrelli with great respect for the "legend" Elizabeth Taylor.I bet Ms. Taylor would enjoy reading this book too,because it is honest and there is no bad gossip at all.

Frankly, I'm enjoying this bio of La Liz. After 60 years she is still considered a quintessential superstar. No matter how much you've read about her, there is still a tidbit or two for readers to enjoy. Elizabeth Taylor has continually fascinated the public with her multiple marriages, escapades, and addictions - and we never seem to get enough. And she has survived it all. Which is the stuff Hollywood legends are usually made of. A good read!

The Washington Post got this book right: This is a shallow, gushy, cut-and-paste puff piece posing as biography.

Author J. Randy Taraborrelli seems unable, even with a team of researchers, to quote accurately from the books from which he cribs his material ("Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry," in particular, from which he lifts many anecdotes without attribution).

Taraborrelli's insight, if you can call it that, on Taylor is that she is not too introspective (no!) and that fame corrupts (how deep!).

He gives a superficial account of early Taylor's life. Her childhood and first four marriages whiz by like the unspooling of an outdated filmstrip. Given Taylor's assertion that her father "batted me around a bit," the book's omission of this aspect of her childhood is glaring. As Taylor's life progresses, Taraborrelli adds more detail as source material becomes easier to find. The reader then is treated to all kinds of meaningless vignettes about Taylor's last three marriages, and torturous detail about her recurring addictions and multiplying health problems (though details seem to conflict with other sources).

Taraborrelli gushes over Taylor's beauty, the (questionable) talents of her many spouses, and how miraculously well-adjusted and normal her children are. Some of these descriptions are obsequious enough to induce a cringe. Other descriptions make one wonder just how much research he did for this book. For instance, he never explored references to one of Taylor's sons having joined a cult in his youth, and descriptions elsewhere of her children being dirty and neglected while she drank and partied.

The book makes clear that Taraborrelli or his staff did interview people, probably a lot of people. But the quality of the interviews and the insight they offer is lacking. Taraborrelli quotes a flip and brittle Eddie Fisher offering nothing of substance. Taraborrelli even asks rhetorically why Taylor still bears a grudge against Fisher, not realizing the irony that this is the kind of question he should theoretically be trying to answer. He also interviews a bevy of people ancillary to the action, such as the son of a film director describing one of what must have been one of many Burton-Taylor makeout sessions on the set of "Cleopatra."

This isn't the first Taraborrelli celebrity bio in which he buries the reader in an avalanche of meaningless gossip-mag minutiae, easily culled from readily available books and magazines, but fails to do any enterprising research of his own. For instance, in the 576 pages of excruciating detail in "Call Her Miss Ross," Taraborrelli neglected to mention that Diana Ross and Berry Gordy had a child together (beyond coyly stating that her oldest child didn't resemble her then-husband).

I'm sure this book will make money hand over fist, which is all that matters to Taraborrelli (that and maybe getting to brown-nose the celebrity in person). But if you want to respect yourself later, flip to the photos, then put this book back where you found it.

OK, it wasn't written well. And there are times where the girl power emphasis, the "way cool"s and such do get a bit tedious, but hey - that is how ms. Cartwright talks. And in that one gets a key piece of info - she is Bart! Literally. We have here the do-what-you-feel boy. Its a fairly open account of her early career on up to Bart, containing therein something which I have found lacking in all other Simpsons books or commentaries. This is the only place I have found anyone involved in the Simpsons discuss the death of the great Phil Hartman. It just annoys me honestly in the DVD commentaries or in books when he is solely referred to as "the late Phil Hartman" in a 4 word quickie statement that then passes to the next Citizen Kane parody. Not that I mean going into any morbid, tabloid details, but acknowledging that one day he was at work and one he wasn't, saying how tragic it was and what a loss to television and those that knew him personally. A cute book for those that like the show, and far better than others (avoid Planet Simpson like the razor Os in frosted Krusty flakes) in terms of anecdotes of the show's early years.

Having read Nancy Cartwright's book, My Life As A Ten Year Old Boy (5 cds, 6 hours, unabridged) which was not a great book or a great tell all. On the printed page, the book was slow and boring. So, I was very leary of an audio version. Well, I was wrong...The audio version sparkles.

Cartwright seems to do a one woman show in narrating her book. Okay, she doesn't fully get her co-stars voice patterns (like Julie Kavner's Marge or the late great Phil Hartman) perfect, but you will know who she is talking about. She is a masterful talent behind a mic, which makes this insiders version of the Simpson family rock.

So, DONT HAVE A COW, MAN over some of her crazy vocal detours Nancy tries. Cartwright's tell all is NOT an audio copy of Nimoy's I am NOT Spock. She is happy in the skin of Bart and it shows. What impresses me more is her humble beginning and her excitement in this reading. It overwhelms the listener. For most Overwhelming is bad, for this it is VERY good. Cartwright is a fan along with all of us ! She still had the awe with the rest of us!

So If you a Simpson fan, Animation fan, Love Saturday Morning Cartoons (or Cartton Network) or a fan of a life in Hollywood stories... this no nonsense, humorous recanting on the history of a cartoon series is great fun...and if you don't like this audio...well to quote Bart Simpson, in his immortal words, "EAT MY SHORTS!"--Bennet Pomerantz, AUDIOWORLD

I had to read this book. I consider The Simpsons to be one of, if not the, greatest TV sitcom ever, and the chance at a behind the scenes look into the show was not something I could refuse. Indeed the cover proclaims it as a look "Behind the Scenes at The Simpsons." Sadly, however, there is very little of this. What this book really is, instead, is a memoir by a would-be celebrity who seems to be shouting the words "recognize me" over and over for 270 pages.

Not that Ms. Cartwright has trouble recognizing herself. This book is, essentially, nothing more than the relating of her life, a bland and boring story that plods along without really anything to pique the reader's interest. She writes poorly, makes use of irritating phrases like "so way cool," shifts tenses several times in a paragraph, and uses quotation marks with reckless abandon. She also presents her life as flat and with a sort of one-sided idealism. Everything goes right-there is never any doubt, no failures or second guesses to cloud this fairy tale. Nancy seems to want everyone to see her life as perfect in every way.

The "behind the scenes" aspect of the work is actually a slew of anecdotes which ranges from stories of people applauding and extolling her greatness to star struck accounts of her own run-ins with celebrity, which almost invariably end with some star validating her inflated opinion of herself by acknowledging her existence. There is a random spattering of the "process" as she, someone who isn't actually involved in the animation process, sees it. If, like me, you're looking for real meat, for actual looks behind the scenes and into the inner workings of Springfield you'll be, again like me, sorely disappointed.

At times it's annoying that Nancy sees herself as a celebrity. At other times its humorous or just plain sad. I actually burst out laughing when she compares Kelsey Grammer's appearances as Sideshow Bob to her own minor role as a forgettable extra in an episode of Cheers. That she has the audacity to refer to herself in that sitcom (years before the Simpsons) as a "guest star" overcame my efforts of keeping a straight face. She seems to be craving respect and recognition, throwing around names of people and stars she's worked with (or who she spent 5 minutes at the mic with during their guest appearances) as if by rubbing shoulders (or, better yet, having shook hands) with celebrities she is, by definition, one herself. As she narrates tales of Kirk Douglas, Mel Gibson, and others she patronizes them by condescendingly taking it upon herself to fantasize what they might be thinking and imagining that they're actually nervous. She has some twisted sense that they have to prove themselves to the Simpsons cast, as if the stars of Spartacus and Braveheart are concerned with what she thinks. Indeed it seems a twisted form of hero worship when she ponders if this or that Hollywood great can, as she puts it, "measure up."

In all fairness Nancy is a very talented voice over artist and certainly deserves respect. It's no stretch of the imagination, however, to remember that she's only one part of Bart Simpson. Taking into account that Homer more or less stole the spotlight from Bart in the first few seasons anyway it's surprising that she has to wonder why she's not constantly mobbed by fans. She ponders why they refused to announce her arrival at a Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony. That she doesn't recognize the limit of her celebrity is, indeed, sad. That her name has to be qualified with the phrase "Voice of Bart Simpson" on the cover should, one would think, provide a hint.

I picked this book up hoping for an in-depth look at both The Simpsons and the development and evolution of Bart Simpson's voice. Sadly, I feel I was let down from start to finish. My respect for Nancy Cartwright as the voice of Bart will continue, but I just can't buy into the celebrity status she's afforded herself. And I'll always remember that several talents on that show eclipse her own, and that there are people on the show who do upwards of 12 or more voices but don't feel the need to write a book about it. You don't see James Earl Jones trying to validate his whole career as the voice of Darth Vader (a voice infinitely more memorable that Bart's), and there's a reason for that. Shameless self-promotion or not, I think Nancy Cartwright said it best herself when she realized she was a "celebrity that nobody knew."

[...]
Although not as detailed as I would have liked, Nancy still offers a unique insider's perspective on the creation of each Simpsons episode. From the writers and storyboard artists' conceptions to the final product, the book takes the reader through the entire process of what it's like to produce an animated television show.

Nancy also gives a brief account of her journey through the business of voice-over artist. She starts with her humble beginnings in school plays and speech competitions through working with her mentor, Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound, Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear, etc.).

In short, this was a very interesting and informative book even if it was, at times, a little "self-serving." But then again, what else do you expect from an autobiography?

]...]

Ugh, I haven't "struggled" through a book like this since high school. I'm a huge Simpsons fan and although I don't care much about Nancy Cartwright, I saw the "Behind the scenes at the Simpsons" sticker on the front cover...so I had to have it.

I know this sounds kinda silly but while reading the book I kept thinking to myself, "Who the heck cares about Nancy Cartwright"?!? She's just a voice, she's in no way interesting. She's also not funny, not even accidently funny. The only laughs I got from the book was about how bad it was.

In addition, she's a poor writer. She should have hired one of these ghost-writers to write her memoirs. I also got the impression from the book that she's an egotistical maniac. Without even reading the book you could probably figure this out, she makes something like $300,000 per episode, so she made off of one episode than off her entire book.

Please please please, stay away from this!!