(St. Martin’s, 336 pages, $26.99)
In Andrew Morton’s unauthorized new tell-all, Angelina Jolie’s very early childhood is portrayed like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, said Susannah Cahalan in the New York Post. Confined to a sterile white room with nothing but a white crib at its center, little Angelina had almost no contact for a year and a half with her mother, actress Marcheline Bertrand, who lived downstairs. Her crime, a “breathless” Morton tells us, was looking too much like her philandering movie-star father, Jon Voight. Abandonment issues were evident early: As a toddler, Angelina didn’t even like to be hugged.
Morton’s emphasis on Jolie’s childhood actually provides a “plausible theory” for the star’s sometimes inscrutable behavior, said Adam Tschorn in the Los Angeles Times. In years past, the 35-year-old Jolie battled anorexia, dabbled in self-cutting, used heroin, and gained a reputation for stealing men. We’ve all read tabloid accounts of Jolie’s marriages to Billy Bob Thornton and Brad Pitt, or her flings with Timothy Hutton and model Jenny Shimizu. But “we have a craving for an explanation, for back story, and Morton’s book offers a satisfying dose of both.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Oddly, Morton doesn’t explain how this damaged person became the Jolie the world knows today, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. At 35, Jolie is Hollywood’s most powerful celebrity, the higher-earning half of the town’s hottest couple, a mother of six, and a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. Morton has been unable to penetrate Jolie’s inner circle; in fact, just about the only people he could convince to talk on the record were one of Jolie’s ex-babysitters and one former drug dealer. The author’s ability to spin weak sourcing into compelling reading have made him a “leading light in the tell-all community.” Here, though, he merely recycles a stale cliché, casting Jolie as a “sleek, treacherous” chameleon, compelled to lure one attached man after another into behaving “exactly as her father did.”
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
-
Crossword: August 23, 2025The Week's daily crossword puzzle
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”