Books, 10/13.

"If as a teenager I attempted to imitate him at parties, it was partly because it seemed deceptively easy, but also because to impersonate Stewart was to become him for a few moments, and that felt quite satisfying, as one's own shyness and awkwardness were redeemed by Stewart's heroic versions of the same traits." For the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O'Brien reads Marc Eliot's Jimmy Stewart: A Biography and realizes: "The scandal of Stewart's life is the absence of scandal."

That doesn't make his life any less interesting, of course: "In his father's fulmination, recollected by his son years later - 'No Stewart has ever gone into show business!' - we catch an echo of an earlier American horror of the theatrical, a near-biblical sense of taboo attaching to theatrical representation and, by association, to the presumed moral laxness of 'show people.' No doubt Stewart carried a good deal of the nineteenth century around with him, and that he seems at home in the small-town Wild West of, say, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is not just acting."

For the Los Angeles Times, Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, reviews John Bengtson's Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin, "a delightfully obsessive piece of artistic detective work. It's an aggressive act of deconstruction, performed in such a loving, relentless, mindful way - no theory, only practice - that it would make the ghost of Jacques Derrida weep with pleasure." Related: Marc Weingarten on Ivan R Dee's The Essential Chaplin.

Thomas Mallon: "Cecil Beaton, who dressed them both, found the older Hepburn to be 'the egomaniac of all time,' whereas the younger one possessed, he thought, a 'waifish, poignant sympathy.' Beaton was better equipped temperamentally to spot the first type, but readers of William J Mann's Kate and Donald Spoto's Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn will be hard pressed to argue with the essence of the designer's appraisals." Related: David Thomson on Kate in the New York Observer.

Also in the New York Times Book Review: Pankaj Mishra on Bruce Wagner's Memorial and Rick Marin on Michael Tolkin's The Return of the Player.

Posted by dwhudson at October 13, 2006 1:45 PM