Bøger af Stefan Kanfer

In this comprehensive biography of one of the great movie icons of our time, Stefan Kanfer, the acclaimed biographer of Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, and Marlon Brando, illuminates the life and career of Humphrey Bogart. Along the way, Kanfer gives us a wide-reaching cultural appraisal of the movies many of us know and love as masterpieces of American cinema: The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, and countless others. He appraises each of the films with an unfailing critical eye, weaving in lively accounts of behind-the-scenes fun and friendships, including, of course, the great love story of Bogart and Lauren Bacall. What emerges in these pages is a portrait of a great Hollywood life, and the final word on why there can only ever be one Bogie.

De Beers Consolidated Mines is fighting for its life. The most powerful and secretive cartel in the world faces diamond smuggling in Angola, disruption in Russia, and a world-wide recession. But this is not the first emergency De Beers has confronted in its long history of struggle and survival. In The Last Empire, Stefan Kanfer chronicles the nineteenth-century diamond rush that transformed Johannes De Beer's humble South African farmstead into an exotic Klondike. With a scholar's precision and a novelist's eye, he recounts the rise of wild frontier towns like New Rush (now Kimberley) and Johannesburg, and their roisterous mix of plutocrats and prostitutes, gamblers and politicians. Kanfer shows the roots of the racial crisis in the developing land: the misery of black miners and the fortunes of white prospectors; the defeat of the African emperor Lobengula and the rise of his legendary adversary, Cecil Rhodes, who would rule both the Cape Colony and De Beers. In the twentieth century, the cartel comes under the control of the Oppenheimers, a German-Jewish dynasty that builds De Beers and its gold-mining twin, the Anglo American Corporation, into an empire of unmatched global reach, and creates a shadow government more flexible and powerful than South Africa's official leadership. Kanfer documents the Oppenheimers' dealings on and under the table: their condemnation of apartheid even as they exploit cheap black labor, their quiet takeover of Salomon Brothers, their monopoly on diamonds and their grip on gold maintained at all costs and by any means. And he uncovers the passionate inside story of the billionaire family whose empire, he argues, will survive well into the twenty-firstcentury.

Marlon Brando will never cease to fascinate us: for his triumphs as an actor (On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris), as well as his disasters; for the power of the screen portrayals he gave, and for his turbulent, tumultuous personal life. Seamlessly intertwining the man and the work, Kanfer takes us through Brando's troubled childhood, to his arrival in New York in the 1940s, where he studied with the legendary Stella Adler, and at the age of twenty-three became the toast of Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire. Kanfer expertly examines each of Brando's films - from The Men in 1950 to The Score in 2001 - making clear the evolution of Brando's singular genius, while also shedding light on the cultural evolution of Hollywood itself. And he brings into focus Brando's self-destructiveness, his lifelong dissembling, his deeply ambivalent feelings towards his chosen vocation, and the tragedies that shadowed his final years. This is a never-before-seen portrait of one of the most extraordinary talents of the twentieth century.