A cleareyed portrait of an impetuous and multitalented man.
Concise biography of a prominent Hollywood writer who became an outspoken advocate for Jewish causes.
In the Depression era, Ben Hecht (1893-1964) was one of the most famous—and highly paid—Hollywood screenwriters, whose prodigious movie credits include Scarface, Twentieth Century, Spellbound, and Notorious. Essayist and biographer Hoffman (Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, 2016, etc.) rescues him from historical obscurity in a lively, well-researched addition to the Yale Jewish Lives series. Hecht was the son of Russian immigrants who moved during his childhood from the tenements of New York to Racine, Wisconsin. At 17, he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and fled to Chicago with no plans except to escape. An uncle finagled a job for him at the Chicago Daily Journal, beginning his career as a reporter that honed his writing skills and inspired his acclaimed 1928 play, The Front Page, co-written with Charles MacArthur. Hecht was a colorful figure in Chicago, consorting with artists and writers who fomented the city’s cultural renaissance and getting his work published in Margaret Anderson’s groundbreaking literary journal, The Little Review. Chicago in the 1920s, one historian remarked, “was the Age of Hecht.” By 1924, he had married, become a father, and left his wife to move, with his lover, to Manhattan, where he dove enthusiastically into the “weeklong benders, wild parties, frantic extramarital coupling,” and heady creativity of Jazz Age America. Hollywood soon beckoned, and Hecht’s “glib wit and knowing insouciance” kept him in demand as a writer and script doctor. Not until 1939, when European anti-Semitism gained international attention, did Hecht embrace his Jewish identity. Although he insisted that “he wasn’t a man of causes,” he made a fervent, vociferous commitment “to the besieged Jews of Europe, to Palestine, and eventually to the state of Israel.” On March 9, 1943, 40,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden to witness We Will Never Die, a star-studded production—Hecht’s “Jewish passion play”—publicizing the plight of European Jewry.
A cleareyed portrait of an impetuous and multitalented man.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-18042-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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