From acting, to cycling, to shell shock
MERYL STREEP once said: “Women are better at acting than men… This is how women have survived through the millennia. We change who we are to fit the exigencies of our time.” Few actresses have proved as adept as Streep at chameleon-like transformation – perhaps because, as this intriguing portrait reveals, she began practising at an early age. Journalist Michael Schulman traces her evolution into one of the finest actresses of her generation – from her New Jersey childhood, to early stardom with a role in The
Deer Hunter opposite her great love, John Cazale, who died of lung cancer shortly afterwards, and Kramer
vs Kramer, for which she won an Academy Award. This is a fascinating account of the making of a great actress. – CYCLISTS in the city are both victim and menace. As pedestrians, we have to be constantly on guard against alarming figures helmeted like Darth Vader on wheels. And scarcely a week goes by without a report of a cyclist who has been killed by a vehicle. Yet to Emily Chappell, who was temping in deadend offices, the work of a cycle courier seemed a noble calling: “Couriers are splendidly anachronistic figures in an age where almost everything is mechanised.” This engaging memoir celebrates the unique view cyclists have of the city, weaving together the delight of navigating its intricate geography with vivid descriptions of the characters on the streets and the camaraderie of the couriers themselves. –
AS the commemorations of the centenary of World War I continue, military historian Taylor Downing’s book offers a remarkable insight into the army’s reaction to what it feared would be an epidemic. “The shellshocked soldier has almost become a symbol of the war and even, it has been argued, a metaphor for the inhumanity of a modern, industrial war,” writes Downing. But to the authorities, the phenomenon of shell shock was not so much a problem of individual trauma as a threat to the functioning of the army as a whole. This vivid, compassionate account draws on harrowing first-person testimony to chronicle the sometimes humane, but more often cruel and uncaring, treatment of damaged men, both in wartime and its aftermath.