About this item
From a writer of "derelict luminosity" (David Mitchell) , a scene-by-scene exploration of Where Eagles Dare, one of cinema's most cherished and popular films, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.Geoff Dyer has loved Where Eagles Dare since childhood. It is both a thrillingly realized Alpine World War II adventure with tough, compelling acting from its two great stars, Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, and a flippant travesty, reducing the central disaster in Europe's modern history to a series of huge explosions and peopled by campy SS officers. As he did in Zona--which took on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker--in Broadsword Calling Danny Boy, Dyer gives us a scene-by-scene reaction to and reading of the film. And perhaps as only he can, the author both extols and denigrates--lovingly and entertainingly no matter which way he falls--this acme of the late '60s action movie.
About the Author
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize) , The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award) , Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award) , and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography) , and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker) . His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi) . His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer. com
