"I was so excited to hear about the new book out to celebrate Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood's 80th birthday, Clint: A Retrospective (Richard Schickel, Sterling, April), being distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link. It's a hardcover, photographic retrospective covering all his film work (as actor and director) over six decades, from Rawhide to his latest, Invictus. It also comes with a 20-minute profile on DVD. Fun."

"With an introduction by Clint Eastwood, this retrospective on his life and career is comprehensive and will serve his fans well. The author is a filmmaker and movie historian and so brings a particularly informed eye to this celebration of Clint Eastwood's long and diverse career. It is the rare Hollywood star who can so successfully forge out a position of genuine admiration from his peers and his audiences. Clint Eastwood is a man of stature in the contemporary American music scene."

"If you're a fan of Clint Eastwood, this grand, weighty, 290-page retrospective by movie historian Richard Schickel will make your day. It's a shamelessly admiring account of the career of perhaps Hollywood's best-loved actor and filmmaker. Eastwood, turning 80 this year, writes with trademark modesty in the tome's foreword that he hopes his films 'will have some life beyond my own'. There's no fear of that as good friend Schickel puts his work as a star and a storyteller in chronological context with the aid of more than 200 photos.

From Eastwood's casting as cowboy Rowdy Yates on TV's Rawhide in 1959 through to the release this year of his Nelson Mandela drama, Invictus, Schickel walks us through his filmography of hits, misses and masterpieces: from the squinting anti-hero in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns to the Dirty Harry movies, the monkey business of Every Which Way But Loose and his most recent triumphs as a director with Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino.

The book, which finishes with a nod to his next film (fittingly titled, Hereafter, and due out in December), comes with a 20-minute DVD following Eastwood around the Warner Bros. studio lot as he reminisces between clips from his best-loved movies."