Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be...
The renowned actor and Trump bugaboo opines about filmmaking, politics, and sundry other matters in this cheerful but not entirely amiable memoir.
Baldwin grew up amid difficult circumstances: a houseful of squalling siblings, parents without resources, fraught conditions—but all of it gave him a certain freedom, since, as he writes, “my father had no money to buy things, and thus no power to manipulate us by withholding those same things.” That freedom, plus a bookish and artistic bent, led him to acting, an art that he describes as scarcely understood to outsiders and particularly to the executives in charge of film studios—which helps explain why Baldwin’s favorite venue is the stage. A generally nice but not cuddly guy in these pages, the author emerges as a careful student of film and film history, and his observations on the craft will be of particular interest to would-be actors; his reading of Steve McQueen and his minimalist acting (“Steve McQueen taught me that sometimes the trick is to do nothing at all”) alone is worth the price of admission. Baldwin can be sharp-tongued, as when he writes of one director, the daughter of David Lynch, that she “had apparently inherited his unruly hairstyle but none of his talent.” With no apparent desire to please or explain away, Baldwin also addresses head-on some of the thornier points on his resume, including the infamous voicemail he left for his young daughter and a spectacularly ugly tabloid divorce. He has much to say on current events as well, and though he is cagey on the question of running for office, he sounds a nice note for the hustings by remarking toward the end, “it is imperative that we replace those who think they own this country with those who built it.”
Baldwin reveals himself to be a man of parts. A pleasure for his many fans, though the sitting president doubtless won’t be placated—but that, Baldwin notes, is for another book.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-240970-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
