Chrystopher J. Spicer
Autor von Clark Gable, in Pictures
Über den Autor
Chrystopher J. Spicer has written extensively about Australian and American film and history. He teaches writing and communication at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.
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A nice pictorial compilation of Gable organized around topics as opposed to a straight through bio. A lot of the pictures not probably seen by many yet many probably missing that would have added to the story. There were also quite a few interesting aspects of Gables's life pointed out that added to the portrait of this celebrity giant.
Diese Rezension wurde für LibraryThing Early Reviewers geschrieben.I wasn't exactly sure what to make of Chrystopher Spicer's 'Clark Gable, in Pictures' upon reading it. I had assumed it was a coffee table book based on the number of photographs, but there is actually a lot more text than your typical coffee table book. It isn't a straight biography either. The focus is on Gable's personal life and hobbies, and there actually isn't much discussion about his film career. Luckily, the text is informative and the photo collection is gorgeous. It is probably best recommended for a pretty hard-core fan of 'The King.' Perhaps someone looking to learn a bit more about the man rather than the movie star.… (mehr)
Diese Rezension wurde für LibraryThing Early Reviewers geschrieben.Clark Gable (1901-1960) was a man's man, fond of outdoor sports, fast cars, and beautiful women. He was also a woman's man, ruggedly handsome, suave, and exuding sex appeal. It is little wonder that he reigned as the King of Hollywood.
This book strives to present a pictorial history of Gable's personal side, drawing mainly upon candid photographs to illustrate his early years, social life, marriages, etc. A chapter is devoted to each of these themes, which results in disjunctures such as unavoidable references to Gable's wives although we haven't met them yet. Nevertheless, it seems to be the best possible arrangement.
Some readers might quibble with what the author has chosen to include and to omit. The lovely actress Loretta Young, for example, costarred with Gable in "The Call of the Wild" and, more significantly, gave birth to his first child, but she receives little attention and the only photograph of her doesn't portray her to best advantage. Conversely, there is all too much detail about Gable's cars and motorcycles, and sometimes about irrelevant bystanders who also appear in the photos. Although the sources of the images are identified, the text lacks endnotes.
Nevertheless, the book is entertaining, if certainly not definitive, and is well worth the time of Gable fans and readers interested in Hollywood of the 1930s through 1950s. Regard it as a supplement to, rather than as a substitute for, a traditional biography.… (mehr)
This book strives to present a pictorial history of Gable's personal side, drawing mainly upon candid photographs to illustrate his early years, social life, marriages, etc. A chapter is devoted to each of these themes, which results in disjunctures such as unavoidable references to Gable's wives although we haven't met them yet. Nevertheless, it seems to be the best possible arrangement.
Some readers might quibble with what the author has chosen to include and to omit. The lovely actress Loretta Young, for example, costarred with Gable in "The Call of the Wild" and, more significantly, gave birth to his first child, but she receives little attention and the only photograph of her doesn't portray her to best advantage. Conversely, there is all too much detail about Gable's cars and motorcycles, and sometimes about irrelevant bystanders who also appear in the photos. Although the sources of the images are identified, the text lacks endnotes.
Nevertheless, the book is entertaining, if certainly not definitive, and is well worth the time of Gable fans and readers interested in Hollywood of the 1930s through 1950s. Regard it as a supplement to, rather than as a substitute for, a traditional biography.… (mehr)
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Cyclone Country, the Language of Place and Disaster in Australian Literature, is fascinating, not least because this study of cyclones in our stories articulates so clearly why Australian literature matters to us so much.
Spicer is a cultural historian, and in his Introduction he explains why the catastrophic storm is more than emblematic of the expulsion from Eden. Cyclones unbalance the way we relate to our world: we tend to take the place we live in for granted. We also like to think that life has meaning but a catastrophe upsets that belief.
The ancient Greeks made sense of unpredictability through their belief in fate:
Perceived like this, catastrophe
It's easy for me to acknowledge this from the comparative safety of suburban Melbourne. Here, although there are an occasional, isolated destructive weather events, large-scale disasters occur beyond the metropolis. But in Northern Australia along the coast, cyclones have been making landfall for millennia, and our post-settlement history is full of examples of catastrophic storms and floods wreaking total destruction on towns, cities and landscapes. Our literature reflects that reality. In trying to make sense of the inexplicable, the literature of trauma derives from the human need to tell and re-tell what happened.
These stories integrate the cyclone as part of the place with which we identify. Place is part of our sense of identity, physically and mentally and it's not just scenery, we inhabit it. Spicer argues that there is a terroir in literature just as there is for wine and cheese. And I would argue that Australians care about this terroir in story-telling, even if we don't consciously know it.
Queensland in fiction has been rendered on the one hand as a tropical paradise, and on the other as a hell on earth. These dualities of light and dark, intense beauty and moody drama find their way into novels, short stories, poetry and memoir, and for Spicer (who is from Queensland) the literature expresses the state's sense of difference and rejection of cultural uniformity. Thea Astley has this to say:
Spicer says that these differences are not now as pronounced, but argumentatively they are still buried in the Queensland psyche.
Whereas early Australian literature centred on the bush, because that's where most people lived and worked, now — according to Philip Drew in The Coast Dwellers (1994) — it is 'the coast, not the outback that is central to the Australian imagination'. Tropical coastlines, however, are routinely subject to cyclones.
The cyclones of North Queensland have often been the catalyst for character transformation in our stories, from Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm (1973), to the apocalypse and epiphany in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) (which I read before starting this blog but you can read about it here). While Virginia Woolf evokes place with the gloomy pessimism of English weather, storms in Thea Astley's tropical Queensland settings reveal characters trapped within the whirling vortexes of circumstances, teetering on the edges of their own personal cyclones.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/11/23/cyclone-country-the-language-of-place-and-di...… (mehr)