Edward White is the author of The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America and has written for publications including the Paris Review. He lives in England.
"A provocative new way of thinking about biography... The radial
structure vibrates, like Hitchcock’s best films, with intuition and
mystery."
*Parul Sehgal - The New York Times*
"Edward White’s The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock is a pinata of
literary pleasures. Learned and graceful, thoughtful and
provocative, White cracks the Hitchcock code with deft analysis and
fine writing. It’s a high-stepping performance full of humor and
depth. Walking a tightrope between criticism and biography, White
places both the man and his myth in the cultural landscape of his
times. In the process, he returns us to the films with a much more
informed eye. A book to keep and to return to."
*John Lahr, author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the
Flesh*
"Perceptive and gracefully written, “The Twelve Lives of Alfred
Hitchcock” is a bracing study of the master of suspense... It is a
rare book that could pleasurably be twice as long."
*The Economist*
"[The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock] is full of such sharp
observations, offering a Hitchcock whose art endures alongside—and
in some ways depends upon—his insecurities and mistakes."
*Farran Smith Nehme - The Wall Street Journal*
"White combines his interpretive zest with sensitivity, clarity and
knife-sharp phrasing, smartly dedicating each of his 12 chapters to
a different facet of the director's personality: the voyeur, the
entertainer, the womaniser, the family man… Anatomising someone of
Hitchcock's stature risks an equally chaotic frenzy of stabs, but
with these 12 scalpel strokes White cuts close to his subject's
heart."
*Victoria Segal - The Sunday Times*
"... innovative biography of Alfred Hitchcock... Tracking
Hitchcock's contemporary influence, White is an enterprising tour
guide... I was happy to be reminded of Cornelia Parker’s
PsychoBarn, constructed in 2016 on the roof of the Metropolitan
Museum in New York... And thanks to White, I went on an excursion
to Leytonstone, Hitchcock’s birthplace in east London... I was also
pleased to learn from White about the lewd Hitchcock tribute in
Eminem’s Music to Be Murdered By."
*Peter Conrad - The Observer*
"The great strength of “The Twelve Lives” is that a reader comes
away from it with a vivid sense of how Hitchcock ignited screen
masterpieces with the fires of his inner discord and
contradictions."
*Alexander Kafka - The Washington Post*
"... a fascinating new study... [The Twelve Lives of Alfred
Hitchcock] is overflowing with anecdotes, memories and curiosities…
the book offers lots of insights into what made him such a
revolutionary director of masterpieces such as North by Northwest
and Rear Window."
*Martin Chilton, Books of the Month May 2021 - The Independent*
"Rather than forcing Hitchcock’s often contradictory guises into a
coherent whole, this deft account takes them as a starting point.
The result is a nuanced and frequently unfamiliar portrait. Essays
on the director’s sartorial and culinary preoccupations and his
penchant for publicity—chapter headings include “The Fat Man” and
“The Dandy”—yield new perspectives on a multifaceted career."
*Briefly Noted - The New Yorker*
"... masterful study... There have been thousands of books
about Hitchcock. This is the best of the bunch, a brilliant
investigation of a man full both of ego and fragile self-esteem, a
sour mixture of self-disgust and self-regard. Hitchcock was aware
that under anyone’s calm surface, dark forces were ‘springing and
swirling within'. To investigate these notions, White chops up his
book into a dozen highly original chapters homing in on such themes
as Hitchcock the Fatty, the Dandy, the Voyeur, the Cockney, and so
forth."
*Roger Lewis - The Daily Mail*
"Using an approach that manages to balance chronology and theme,
[White] presents the subject from a dozen angles, many of them in
implicit opposition… his use of sources is inventive, and he
exhibits breezy authority on a range of relevant themes, from
dietetics and mid-century slimming to Catholic prayer."
*Leo Robson - New Statesman*
"Running the gamut from 'The Boy Who Couldn't Grow Up' to 'The Man
Of God', White's book... deftly divvies up the director's 80 years
into a dozen readable chunks. If Hitch was, as this author
suggests, "a codex of his times," this is as good a way as any to
decipher him."
*Neil Smith - Total Film*
"White’s book is a perceptive, plainspoken, and vigorous portrait
of an exceedingly strange, complicated, and perhaps deeply wounded
man."
*John Banville - New Republic*
"It's an elegant, divertingly readable performance... it's the
affinities, the connecting threads and evocative side-glances with
which White salts his text that repeatedly spark new insights into
both the man and his work... as this entertaining and provocative
book shows, a lot of satisfaction can be derived from exploring the
mystery."
*Philip Kemp - Sight & Sound*
"It feels a fresh way to organise a familiar story… [The Twelve
Lives of Alfred Hitchcock] allows White to examine the binaries
that run through Hitchcock’s life; the man who had both an enormous
ego and fragile self-esteem, the uxorious husband who was also
lecherous, the dandy in the body of a fat man and the
end-of-the-pier entertainer who could also be framed as an
avant-garde artist."
*Teddy Jamieson - The Herald*
"While Hitchcock has been the subject of more books than any other
filmmaker, the man behind the titillating, terrifying mask remains
an enigma… Edward White’s answer to this conundrum is to dismember
Hitchcock into a dozen parts."
*Christopher Bray - The Mail on Sunday*
"The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White considers the
many different aspects of the great film-maker’s life and work,
including family man, Londoner, pioneer and dandy, and how they
often intertwined."
*Choice*
"[The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock] is an original, absorbing
study which captures the contradictory nature of ‘the Master of
Suspense’."
*Book of the Week - The Week*
"... elegant and erudite biography… More than 100 books have been
written about the Hitchcock phenomenon, but this must be one of the
most straightforwardly enjoyable. More a collection of essays than
a full-blown biography... [The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock]
will send readers back to the films with renewed appreciation."
*Andrew Lynch - The Business Post*
"The number of tomes written about Alfred Hitchcock could fill a
large bookcase, but Edward White takes a novel approach. In The
Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, he looks at a dozen aspects of
the great director's life, work and influence. It's a ploy to
entertain and enlighten even those of us who think we know Hitch
inside out. White offers new interpretations of some of his most
celebrated films but seeks to uncover the man beneath the myth that
Hitchcock, himself, so carefully curated."
*Summer Reads - The Irish Independent*
"White writes with the contemporary moment in mind yet avoids
twisting his subject’s accomplishments to suit new tastes. His book
is entirely accessible without being glib or sensationalist; it is
well-researched and wide-ranging in its cultural references without
being pedantic or effete. I know of no other book on Hitchcock that
wears its breadth of knowledge so lightly... One completes this
book feeling one knows Hitchcock as well as he could be known, and
with renewed respect for his gifts and his influence on
culture."
*Paula Marantz Cohen - Times Literary Supplement*
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