Customer Reviews

Boris Karloff: The Man Remembered

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
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The other day I was fairly well sure I was going to be having a bad day. I had an afternoon appointment to see a medical specialist for an exam; I was on pins and needles with anxiety. (Turns out I'm fine.) But did I have a bad day? No. I had just gotten in the mail a new book that cheered me and entertained me--Gordon F. Shriver's BORIS KARLOFF: THE MAN REMEMBERED. I read it all the way through the same day I got it! The basic facts of Karloff's life won't be new to anyone who has read other bios on The King Of Horror. But Mr. Shriver has painstakingly assembled a large gathering of anecdotes and details of Boris' personal and professional life that WILL be new to fans of Karloff, and has provided as well as a few photos that won't be familiar at all to Karloff aficionados.

Any Karloff kompletist will want this next to his/her copy of Cynthia Lindsay's DEAR BORIS. (I think of them as companion volumes.) You will know Boris better. You will also get a better sense of what Evie Karloff, Boris' last wife, was like, and for that we can be grateful as well. Really--if you like classic horror films, and enjoy biography, do yourself a favor and get this book!

Evidently, Gordon Shriver has been a big fan of one of the greatest actors (not to mention human beings, as we discover) of the 20th Century. Apart from a few too many typos and other printer's errors, this book is an easy to read and thoroughly indexed work for your movie masters' shelves. I was alternately thrilled and awed by the sheer number of people Karloff touched - professionally and personally. Gordon Shriver managed to meet or otherwise correspond with literally dozens of them; their kind and candid obseervations and charming anecdotes bring a fresh perspective to a movie star much maligned. In light of the most recent retrospective of Boris' work, shown at the Film Forum, NYC, this loving tribute will be most welcomed by karloff fans old and new everywhere.

A beautifully written biography, the author explores with much affection the actor whose personal life was juxtaposed to "the monster" he is best known for portraying. A must-read for horror/terror fans as well as theatre/movie buffs.

This is a detailed review of the life of Boris Karloff by an author who performed a vast amount of research and who has a true fondness for the person he was writing about. The picture of Karloff presented in this book changed my perception of the man greatly. Very well done. I recommend it highly to anyone who is only vagurely familiar with Mr. Karloff and his work.

The best thing about this book is the cover photo, an early portrait of Karloff, probably from about 1920. (The photo reappears in the section of the book devoted to photos, but no date is given.) Other than that, I can't say I'm too impressed. The writing is very poor and amateurish, with lots of typos, incorrect punctuation (there are sentences inside parentheses within another sentence...like this), and very cursory writing. Some things seem lifted right out of other books or articles. There is, for just one example, mention of a play Karloff did on Broadway, but then for three paragraphs the author rattles on about other people in the play. Let's save that for books about them, shall we? We're focusing on Karloff here!

Karloff's early career is pretty much glossed over, I suppose falling outside the purview of this work. The most in-depth coverage is of his last few years, but even then it's hit or miss. The author apparently found a few details about some things and included them, but simply skipped over whole sections where he didn't have that information. Much space is devoted to comments from various people who knew or worked with Karloff in his later years. And too much space is devoted to reviews of plays and movies he did that concentrate on the quality of the plays/movies or other actors with only passing mention of Karloff's performance in them.

Much of the final portion is taken up with a filmography, a list of theatre and TV appearances, recordings, and an index. In fact, the actual text starts on page 5 and ends at page 142. And 15 of those 137 pages are photos. So out of 208 pages, you're actually getting only 122 pages of text. In other words, only 59% of the book is actual text! For a man who lived to be 81 and worked nearly to the end of his days, that's a pretty slim summary of his life! And at $17.00 for a paperback, this wasn't a cheap book, either. Can you spell rip-off?

Actually, those appendices -- the filmography, TV appearances, theatre work, recordings, etc. -- constitute the most informative part of the book. One ventures to guess that the author probably copied these from some other source. Whatever their genesis, they and that cover photo are the true values here.

The author lists among his writing credits Famous Monsters of Filmland, a magazine I remember well from my high-school years when it was first published. I think perhaps that's where his growth as a writer halted. Quite disappointing.