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Bezig met laden... Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2008)door Lee Israel
Books Read in 2023 (1,342) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. This lowlife's claim to fame as a writer are biographies of Bankhead and Estee Lauder. Nobody was hiring for hack biographies so she supplemented her income by first writing, signing and selling to unsuspecting dealers letters from famous people. Later she graduated to stealing original letters from rare book libraries and substituting her miserable forgeries. Israel's writing is very repetitive and not very engaging. One gets the sense that Ms. Israel does not take this poor behavior very seriously, and, indeed, she does not have to do any jail time. It seems that the theft of books or other collectibles does not warrant much attention from either law enforcement or the judiciary. Each time I read about the meagre punishment given to these thieves the more outraged I get (quietly). Melissa McCarthy does seem a very appropriate choice to play this lady in a movie. People will find her cute and funny, as long as you don't own.a bookstore or are a rare book librarian! ( ) As a librarian I’m aghast (!) at the crimes Lee Israel committed, perjuring letters from the literary cavalcade of popular or “ignoble” writers. However, as a reader, her story made me: sad (her inability to continue using her skills to support herself, leading to a period of downfall admire the creative drive (using said skill and gift as a means to inventively go on) and chortle at her reinsured turns of phrase and circumstance All this in 127 short pages! This is a fun little romp! It's slight, and I would have loved more gory details, but I'm pretty happy to have spent some time with the book. The dig on Paddy Chayefsky proving that he couldn't write realistic women by writing Network is dang true. (Good movie, unrealistic women... and men too, really.) So yes, a decent bit of entertainment. It is noticeable that this is titled memoirs of a lterary forger, rather than confessions. And that sets the tone of the piece. It is an odd combination of misery memior about her descent from making a living as an author to being broke enough to consider forgery. Then there is a sense of bragging about the letters she forged, which are quoted extensively, and how those who she fooled were clearly schmucks who deserved it. There's some interesting detail about watermarks and typewriters and the mechanics of the process, and that for me was the most interesting. The rest of it was a puff piece and overly full of padding. The author sounds unpleasant and unrepentant and I can't say I feel at all sorry for her and her self-inflicted predicament. The title is taken form a phrase she put into the Dorothy Parker letter and not a sense of the author's repentance for her crime. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy--Lee Israel's hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others. Before turning to her life of crime--running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI--Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she'd received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward--and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers. "Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining...[in her] gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics" (The Associated Press). Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is "a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures" (The New York Times Book Review). Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)364.16Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Crimes of propertyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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