Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.
Tell-all memoirs of the tempestuous, sometimes tortured relationship between two personalities cast by fate and a whole bunch of money as comic and straight man.
Give Lewis credit for selective candor, but what he reveals about himself in the process of telling his side of the Martin (1917–95) and Lewis story is often more trenchant than his conflicted report of what went wrong, and occasionally right, with the partnership that lasted a lime-lit ten years. While Lewis opens and closes with heartfelt admiration and—yes, at one point they do affirm it to one another—love for what he calls the best straight man ever to tread a stage, in this book’s long interim, Martin’s character suffers the death of a thousand condescensions. Even as Lewis starts by recalling their last, choked-up performance together in 1956 at New York’s Copacabana, for example, he muses that while “truth was my greatest ally . . . Dean could lie if it would spare someone’s feelings. I had difficulty with that.” And from the beginning, it’s the older Martin, in a “big brother” role Lewis conjures for himself, introducing the kid to hard liquor (although Martin’s later boozy TV persona was a well-calculated act), mobsters, marijuana and, most of all, “other” women. Jerry eventually rationalizes philandering as just part of showbiz; he confesses they made the scene together with peaches-’n’-cream MGM actresses June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven (both married to Hollywood actors at the time) in what is described as an extended Manhattan shack-up. It’s Martin’s consistent insensitivities and ingratitude, often tinged with ridicule, that start to grind, however. He plays golf and reads comic books while Lewis deals with business, etc., and at one point is a no-show at a charity commitment. Lewis blows up (he claims he initiated the split), and after a nasty onstage fall—solo—winds up gobbling Percodans.
Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-2086-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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