A raw, revealing memoir from a courageous actor and writer.
The award-winning actor uncovers his family's darkest secret.
Instead of writing a showbiz memoir with stories of his eclectic career, Cumming—who has won countless acting awards, including a Tony for his role in Cabaret—anchors his book with his discovery of the truth about his grandfather's premature death (at age 35) and a recognition of the "dual family narrative" of shame and secrecy. He came to understand that both he and his grandfather Tommy Darling suffered combat stress: Darling as a decorated World War II soldier and the author at the hands of his father. Cumming creates visceral scenes of his father's unhinged, irrational anger during his childhood in the Scottish countryside. He details the physical and psychological violence his father mercilessly heaped upon him, including a beating so ferocious he wanted to die, having his hair brutally shorn against his will with rusty clippers used on sheep, and hearing countless times that he was pathetic and useless. Cumming and his brother learned to shut down their emotions and suppress any feelings of joy, lest their vindictive, tyrannical father remove from their lives whatever gave them pleasure. As an adult, he freely expresses the authentic "pixielike" personality he abandoned in childhood, when he couldn't play and enjoy life. He also kept some totems from his childhood, miserable though it was (he even wore his father's sweater in his first headshot!), since he regards them as "a part of my happiness today, because it is a part of me." From discovering the truth about his grandfather's mysterious death to attempting to understand his father's sadistic nature, Cumming explains that it is important to be candid and forthright, that “there is never shame in being open and honest.”
A raw, revealing memoir from a courageous actor and writer.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062225061
Page Count: 288
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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