Book Club - by Luke

Biography & History - Book Club

The New and Official Peter Jackson biography

November 1st 2006 07:59

Since 'Lord of the Rings' stormed the silver screen and Peter Jackson rose from b-grade horror auteur to Academy-Award winning director (and all-round household name!), there have been two or three biographies of the man rushed out to the masses. All of these were very much of the unofficial variety, writers poring over interviews and tracking his career from pre-go to woah, not without some passion or detail, but not with the direct involvement of the man himself either.

And now we finally have an 'official' biography. Peter Jackson didn't write it, he's far too busy for that, but every sentence of it comes stamped with his approval. And it's a bloody big book too.

I had a quick flick through it... it looks very promising. Aside from a lot of colour photographs with personal commentary from Jackson himself, there are also other black and white photos gracing the many pages between from his own personal archives. Photos of his labour-of-love effects-work in the 80s, photos of him nerding it up at conventions pre-film career, stacks and stacks of fascinating pictures of everything you can possibly want to see. It's pretty in-depth, and Jackson's own words on the cover promise that's all predominantly about film-making and that there's none of the boring stuff in-between that you might find in other biographies.

There are a lot of things you could probably say about Peter Jackson if you sought to cast dispersions on his talent, but I don't think you could claim that he doesn't care about his fans. The man was a fan himself at one point, attending conventions and gushing over films and celebrities like the best of film-geeks, and he knows what fans like. He ensures that his films come packed with stacks of extras when he releases them on DVD, and now - with this book - he's packed it full of the sort of quirky trivia that fans like and left out the boring crap that has ruined many an other biography.

It looks very promising, another book on my to-read list!

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Luke - Category: Biography & History

Email this Post to a Friend

Wild Swans

September 4th 2006 07:28

'Wild Swans' is an biographical/autobiographical account of modern Chinese history. Author Jung Chang shows us the many changes, trials and tribulations that China faced in the 20th century, telling us the story in a very personal way through the eyes of her grandmother, her mother and then herself.

Chang starts the story with her grandmother, a Warlord's concubine in the early days of post-Imperial China. We're given an intensly re-created vision of early 20th century China and follow the rise of Communism and it's supplanting of the near-feudal regimes that existed before it. From here the story follows Chang's mother, a Maoist who rose to a prominent position within the government before falling prey to the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself was also a Maoist devotee and member of the Communist Party, and the book's retelling of events takes us up to her own disallusionment with Communist China.

If you only have a passing familiarity with recent Chinese history then I could not reccommend this book more... Chang's vibrant and journalistic writing style ensures that boredom never sets in and everything is shown to us from scratch and from an easily identifiable and accessible point of view. By focusing on the women of her family Chang is able to show us the more familial aspects of Chinese culture and it's errosion under the regime of Chairman Mao. Most heartbreaking of all, Chang's own family was consumed by the many insecure purges instigated by Mao in his desperate attempts to hold onto power and some of the events that transpire in this book are horrific - and all the more uplifting for Chang will to tell this story.

If you already know a fair bit about Communist China than this book is still well worth reading for it's informative biographical examination of the country's history as seen by three generations of women in the one family. Chang is an adept writer and her descriptions brought the various periods and locations in China alive in my mind. I never understood the horror of the Cultural Revolution until I saw it in this book.

Wild Swans won the prestigous NCR and British book awards, is currently banned in China, and critically acclaimed throughout the world. We read it in school and I maintain that this is the best book I ever read during my various English classes. Chang followed this novel up last year with an incredibly in-depth biography of Chairman Mao.