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A review by poisonenvy
Warrior: Audrey Hepburn by Luca Dotti, Robert Matzen
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
As most of my friends can attest (and anyone who's ever visited my apartment), I've am very much in love with Audrey Hepburn. I've been in love with her ever since I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany's in tenth grade. I've watched her entire filmography, most of the movies more than once, and she's about the only celebrity that I would ever willingly read biographies of (she is my one exception to my 'I don't care about celebrities and I have some pretty serious concerns about celebrity worship and our culture's obsession with them).
Earlier this year, this book and Robert Matzen's other biography on Audrey Hepburn, Dutch Girl, went on sale on Chirp Audiobooks, and so of course I snatched them both up. I read Dutch Girl -- a book detailing Audrey's teen years in World War II and in Nazi occupied Holland, which delved a little into the efforts the teenager made with the resistance there -- and was pretty excited to read about this book. Warrior had the same audiobook narrator as Dutch Girl, and Tavia Gilbert once again knocked it out of the park with her excellent narration.
It relays a lot of the information that was present in Dutch Girl, but I don't think this is a failing. Matzen drew a very clear path between the horror Audrey went through in the war, including famine, and how it shaped her dedication to helping other children who were suffering through famine and war in her later years.
This book chronicles the final years of her life working for UNICEF - The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund - and as part of that work, she toured poverty and war torn countries, doing what she could to raise awareness and raise money for these children. She did it in an entirely selfless way; it has been said by those closest to her that her tireless work with UNICEF is ultimately what led to her death at the age of 63.
There's certainly more material to work with in Audrey's final years, but even still Matzen delves deeply into only tangentially related topics -- including Bob Geldof and the Band-Aid/Live Aid event (which I was disappointed was not examined more critically) -- in the same way he did in Dutch Girl, but, like Dutch Girl, I appreciated many of them for giving a more robust picture of what was happening at the time.
While the book did, in fact, touch quite a bit on how Western Imperialism and European Colonialism is the driving factor between many of the conditions in developing countries, though not with any real depth, I was a little disappointed that it didn't go into what effects Audrey Hepburn and UNICEF had in the countries they visited. I do, however, recognize that that topic is well beyond of the scope of the book, which is, at it's core, a biography written on the final years of Audrey Hepburn's life.
This book was excellent though. Very listenable, and only served to raise Audrey Hepburn even higher in my esteem.
Earlier this year, this book and Robert Matzen's other biography on Audrey Hepburn, Dutch Girl, went on sale on Chirp Audiobooks, and so of course I snatched them both up. I read Dutch Girl -- a book detailing Audrey's teen years in World War II and in Nazi occupied Holland, which delved a little into the efforts the teenager made with the resistance there -- and was pretty excited to read about this book. Warrior had the same audiobook narrator as Dutch Girl, and Tavia Gilbert once again knocked it out of the park with her excellent narration.
It relays a lot of the information that was present in Dutch Girl, but I don't think this is a failing. Matzen drew a very clear path between the horror Audrey went through in the war, including famine, and how it shaped her dedication to helping other children who were suffering through famine and war in her later years.
This book chronicles the final years of her life working for UNICEF - The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund - and as part of that work, she toured poverty and war torn countries, doing what she could to raise awareness and raise money for these children. She did it in an entirely selfless way; it has been said by those closest to her that her tireless work with UNICEF is ultimately what led to her death at the age of 63.
There's certainly more material to work with in Audrey's final years, but even still Matzen delves deeply into only tangentially related topics -- including Bob Geldof and the Band-Aid/Live Aid event (which I was disappointed was not examined more critically) -- in the same way he did in Dutch Girl, but, like Dutch Girl, I appreciated many of them for giving a more robust picture of what was happening at the time.
While the book did, in fact, touch quite a bit on how Western Imperialism and European Colonialism is the driving factor between many of the conditions in developing countries, though not with any real depth, I was a little disappointed that it didn't go into what effects Audrey Hepburn and UNICEF had in the countries they visited. I do, however, recognize that that topic is well beyond of the scope of the book, which is, at it's core, a biography written on the final years of Audrey Hepburn's life.
This book was excellent though. Very listenable, and only served to raise Audrey Hepburn even higher in my esteem.